Shelby Steele Quotes

Even though we are a nation that's becoming a minority country, we still have this view where everything is seen through the prism of the dominant culture, which really means white.

So many white kids, English kids - we had no culture.

In this room we're all here together, but there's probably a lot of different views, people sitting here thinking, I don't own any slaves, all the slaves are dead. Why am I responsible? My family were immigrants, too.

Just because I grew up a white guy in America doesn't mean that's the music of my life.

'Be faithful to your roots' is the liberal version of 'Stay in your ghetto.'

There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is.

White Americans today don't know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that's where they made their mistake... they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.

The question was heatedly debated of how much Western culture should be brought into China.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

It's not surprising to me that in a country born of racial genocide, the issue of race is still an open wound on the American soul. We haven't dealt with it.

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out.

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

I definitely think the fact that I come from a multicultural background, my mother living life in a white skin and having white skin privilege from the time I was little, I was aware of that.

A racial or religious or tribal identity is a kind of fact.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.

I cannot see that everything the white man does is to be copied.

Black people don't own Harlem, so why should Black people care whether it burns down or not?

What has happened in America over 400 years has never been cleaned up. We just put on some new clothes in the midst of the old filth.

This nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.

We’re always talking about blacks as a group and whites as individuals.

In fact, for blacks who have education and who have not succumbed to a new lifestyle—the grievances, and the coarseness represented by rap music—it’s gotten tremendously better. What’s disheartening, though, is that when you study ethnic groups around the world, the ones that are lagging behind are those where their leaders always tell the same story: that it’s other people holding you back, and that therefore you need to stand against those other people and resist their culture. But that culture may be the key to success.

There is no such thing as talking about class without there being implications of the racial history of the United States. You just can't do it.

I am constantly accused of being 'First World.' So what should I do? I can't apologise for my environment, upbringing, aesthetic.