Shelby Steele Quotes

I think viewing people by the color of their skin is one of the dumbest ways to view people.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

If you took away the color of Barack Obama's skin, nobody right now would be paying him any attention.

Black, white, yellow, brown - we wanted somebody who would do right by us. And I think because Obama was that person, whether he was black or white, he was chosen

To define each of us by our race is nothing short of a denial of our humanity.

I feel that if you can transcend the color of your skin, with your talent, why carry that as a badge or a label?

"Race." I really can't understand it as anything other than something people say. The people who have said that you and I are both "black" and therefore deserve a certain kind of interaction with the world, they make race. I can't take them seriously.

We see through the eyes of children that they're not talking about race the way we grown folks are. They're not talking about color or how much melanin is in someone's skin.

A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.

I've always been talking about race in some sort of capacity.

I don't know what to say about Asians. I think everyone is "racist," to differing degrees, in that everyone's brain will automatically associate information with other information, based on the information they are looking at (for example skin color, bone structure), but I think focusing on race in any manner that isn't neutral or self-aware probably increases racism.

I wanted to separate color from race. Distinguishing color - light, black, in-between - as the marker for race is really an error.

There is no such thing as race. None. There is just a human race - scientifically, anthropologically. Racism is a construct, a social construct... it has a social function, racism.

A greater truth that I think we are faced with on a day-to-day basis as minorities is: We are the color of skin first and people second.

I say that the negro, when he is, when, when they cease to look at him as a negro and realize that he's a human being, then they will realize that he is just as capable and has the right to do anything that any other human being on this earth has a right to do to defend himself.

I never have a problem with being black. I have a problem with the easy association of what that means to some people.

Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike

Race? It is a feeling, not a reality. Ninety-five per cent, at least. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today.... National pride has no need of the delirium of race.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

Race is a part of every conversation in America, whether you know it or not.

Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

The color of a person's skin had nothing to do with the content of their character.

Under the color-blind ideology of the new racism, Blackness must be SEEN as evidence for the alleged color blindness that seemingly characterizes contemporary economic opportunity.

We should not be post-racial: seeking to get beyond the uplifting meanings and edifying registers of blackness. Rather, we should be post-racist: moving beyond cultural fascism and vicious narratives of racial privilege and superiority that tear at the fabric of "e pluribus unum.