Shelby Steele Quotes

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

Racism can be called our nation's own specific 'original sin.'

My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white man.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

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

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That's so difficult because I don't think anyone can ever understand it. It's not that people don't want to understand it, but they don't want to touch it.

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?

We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease.

Washington shows the Negro not only at his best, but also at his worst.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.

[The Negro is] an inferior race, who in all ages, and in every part of the globe, ... has shown themselves incapable of self-government.

It is really my opinion that the whole race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.

The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

The number of negroes do extremely increase in this Province, and through the afflicting providence of God, the whites do not proportionably multiply, by reason whereof, the safety of the said province is greatly endangered

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

If the blacks make war upon us they must abide by the awful retribution that will follow

The ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition, the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a menace in his upward development, while others—usually the sons of the masters—wish to help him to rise. National opinion has enabled this last class to maintain the Negro common schools, and to protect the Negro partially in property, life, and limb.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.