Shelby Steele Quotes

This is a racist country.

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life, but with the product of these conditions, the Negro himself.

When 10 Blacks die in this country, Whites don't care. It is as if flies had died.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

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

I certainly know about the oppression and prejudices of being black and a woman and from the South.

If I were white, I could capture the world.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

Black people are inferior to Caucasians. Blacks constitute a totally distinct group; they overshadow the country with the germ... of evil.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

The essence of racism is prejudice coupled with power ... Our primary experience is one of white privilege, even in places where whites may be a minority in the surrounding population.

White men are taking advantage of black men all over the world because black men are disunited.

There are people out there like Fox News who, every time a Black person complains in public of how we are treated in our society, is accused of “playing the race card.”

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

Now in speaking like this, it doesn't mean that we're anti-white, but it does mean we're anti-exploitation, we're anti-degradation, we're anti-oppression. And if the white man doesn't want us to be anti-him, let him stop oppressing and exploiting and degrading us.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

The real unifying force in American political life is whiteness, no matter its party, gender, region or, at times, even its class.

Blacks, especially in America, have been raised with a slave mentality - they don't feel that they have the right to speak as loud as possible.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

The clock has been turned back on racial progress in America, though scarcely anyone seems to notice. All eyes are fixed on people like Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey who have defied the odds and achieved great power, wealth, and fame.