Shelby Steele Quotes

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.

In America, a black man has to feel like he's God just to make it a little bit when white people can just feel human. They can just be themselves, but for me, I feel we have to start instilling that back into our people. That pride. That black power. That privilege to be alive.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

Black people don't even question things any more, they simply follow the lead.

The only thing that white people have that black people need, or should want, is power-and no one holds power forever.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

I don't want our white working class sisters and brothers to feel as though their pain is not important because it is. But at the same time, I want my white sisters and brothers to understand that when we talk about income and wealth inequality, that disproportionately African Americans suffer a little more.

White America's live under this accusation that they're racist, they need to prove that they're not racist. In order to prove that you're not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we'll engineer you into the future, we'll engineer you into equality.

The mentality of how we treat one another needs to be examined - especially how we treat our men of color.

I don't think any of us that are white can ever fully understand what it's like to be a black person in America today.

Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

A lot of people are quick to say that saying 'black lives matter' makes you anti-cop. All lives should indeed matter, but we have a systemic problem in this country in which black lives do not matter enough.

People on the Left get a pass when it comes to condemning white Americans.

Those who politically theorise the artificial concept of 'whiteness' infer that anyone who has white skin cannot escape their unconscious bias. If you object, you are accused of failing to come to terms with your white privilege.

I don't believe in reverse racism. I really don't.

#BlackLivesMatter has raised the bar in our national dialog: Addressing economic inequality is necessary but not sufficient. It is also necessary to directly confront racial injustice.

A lot of people of color and the Black Lives Matter movement will talk about what's really happening, but it seems like you can't get the black president to say something that's obvious about what's happening to black people in this country.