Shelby Steele Quotes

I'm most biased about how white people have to learn to shut up when the conversation of racism comes up. White people have to learn to listen. Whether they agree with what they're hearing or not, they have to know to shut up and listen.

In those days [1955], affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

A white man of authority don't ever want to admit to someone of colour they was wrong.

Some issues just need to be dealt with - that we're still dealing with in the world, with police brutality and racism.

Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

Let's be honest: For a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young, black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear.

Of all the ways people save time, I think racism is the worst.

We are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

As a person of color, you're in a PhD level racism class, every day. Every day, I'm in a deep racism seminar. And I'm not saying that white people aren't taking that class, but they don't show up that often and they're auditing it.

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

Racism was never acceptable to the people who suffer from it.

I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all that I can call my own.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

Murder and lying comes easy for white people.

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

As for the not-black black president issue - white people can imagine blacks worse off than them, no problem. And now they can imagine blacks better off, no problem. But they still can't imagine black people who are just like them. That's the real problem. That's racism. Not being able to believe that those others are actually just like you.

White individuals that have been going to jail. Segregation still exists; discrimination still exists. A few isolated white people whose individual acts are designed to eliminate this, that or, or the next thing but, yet, it is never eliminated is in no way impressive to me.

Many White people are not sensitive to the kind of abuse that African Americans, especially younger African Americans, receive at the hands of police officers and police departments. I think for most Whites their experience with the police has been good or neutral because they don't interact with the police as much as those in the Black community.

If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

We have the disgrace of racial discrimination, or we have prejudice against people because of their religion. We have not had the courage to uproot these things, although we know they are wrong.

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.