Quotes from Shelby Steele

Palestinians have balked every time their longed-for nationhood has come within grasp. They have seemed to prefer the aggrieved dignity of their resentments to the challenges of nationhood.

No doubt Israel and America have made mistakes in the Middle East. Certainly, Israel was born at the price of considerable dislocation and suffering on the part of the Palestinians. And yes, there will never be a satisfying answer for this.

I remember being a teenager, I never thought that I'd live in a society that was not segregated. It happened.

Conservatives have rightly attacked rap for its misogyny, violence and over-the-top vulgarity. But it is important to remember that this music is a fairly accurate message from a part of society where human connections are fractured and impossible, so fraught with disappointments and pain that only an assault on human feeling itself can assuage.

Conservatism's vulnerability is simply that it has no way to extract power from the evils America owned up to in the '60s - no way to use the sins of the past to coerce Americans into doing what it wants.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton cannot write a timeless letter to us from a Birmingham jail or walk, as John Lewis did in 1965, across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a maelstrom of police dogs and billy clubs.

In the broader American culture - the mainstream media, the world of the arts and entertainment, the high-tech world, and the entire enterprise of public and private education - conservatism suffers a decided ill repute.

In certain quarters, conservatism is simply racism by another name. And minorities who openly identify themselves as conservatives are still novelties, fish out of water.

The only thing that makes me interesting as a writer is that I'm just talking common sense. The most ordinary, everyday sort of common sense.

Blacks had survived every form of human debasement with ingenuity, self-reliance, a deep and ironic humor, a capacity for self-reinvention and a heroic fortitude. But we had no experience of wide-open freedom.

In theory, affirmative action certainly has all the moral symmetry that fairness requires. It is reformist and corrective, even repentent and redemptive.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, good liberals both, pursued power by offering their candidacies as opportunities for Americans to document their innocence of the nation's past.

I know that whatever power Shelby Steele has always comes out of the writing. I'm not the greatest television pundit or the best public speaker, so it's my writing that's most important.

I am a middle-class black, a college professor, far from wealthy, but also well removed from the kind of deprivation that would qualify my children for the label 'disadvantaged.'

Our families have fallen to pieces. 75 percent of all black children are born out of wedlock, without a father.

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

But blacks make little to no progress and, worse, the preoccupation with injustice only leaves them eternally inconsolable and cut off from their own best energies and talents.

Rap makes the conservative argument about what happens when family life is eroded either by welfare and drugs, or by the stresses and indulgences of middle-class life.

In looking at difficulties in the black American community over the years, it has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture.

I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level - the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.

So we've never had a President of the United States ask anything of black citizens. And I think the reason for that is they've all felt that if they presume to do that, that they would be stigmatized as racist.

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.

White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West. It makes the First World apologetic. And this, of course, only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.