Shelby Steele Quotes

If you're black in America, race is a factor in your life. Start with that assumption.

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.

I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

Nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

The real nightmare resides in a society that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual racist ideologies, practices and policies that cripple any viable notion of justice and democracy.

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

I never want to position myself where I seem like an ambassador of anti-racism. I am fortunate enough to say that I've never experienced extreme amounts of racism, but a lot of my friends do.

I'm a grandmother and like every grandmother, I worry about the safety and security of my grandchildren, but my worries are not the same as black grandmothers.

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

One must learn how to be black in America.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

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.

There has been, and there will continue to be, vigorous discussions about race in America. I worry that little will come of these discussions because we aren't addressing what must be done to change the current racial climate.

To believe that the United States is post-racial requires an almost incomprehensible inability or unwillingness to stare truth in the face.

Our failure as a society to properly acknowledge and confront the psychological, social, and political effects of white privilege has perpetuated racial inequality and race-based political resentments.

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

The race question in America has often been about race, but it has equally often been about power.

I believe the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as a very large swath of the American population, really wants to imagine that race and racial inequality is something we don't have to think about anymore, don't have to worry about anymore.

There is a multitude of experiences that make up the black experience.