Quotes from Shelby Steele

For many on the left a hateful anti-Americanism has become a self-congratulatory lifestyle.

So white guilt is not a guilt of conscience; it's not something that you get up in the morning and say, my God, I feel guilty about what happened to black Americans. Rather it is the fact that in relation to black Americans you lack moral authority.

The great drama at the core of American race relations is always the same: Can black Americans ever be truly equal - are they capable of achieving it and are others capable of accepting it?

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn't.

Black identity since the '60s has been a totalitarian identity. It's enforced. And if you don't subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.

You will be far more likely to receive racial preferences than to suffer racial discrimination.

respected for their talent rather than endured for their color and that they would be read by all our students on a regular basis. An

was largely a response to white guilt. This guilt is the vacuum in moral authority created by all of white America's moral failings and infidelities to democracy: racism, sexism, imperialism, materialism, conformity, environmental indifference, educational inequality, superficiality, greed, and so on.

In other words, there were clear cultural patterns within the black community itself—having nothing to do with racism or discrimination in the 1960s—that would keep blacks from achieving true parity with whites.

Political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth. It coerces people into suspending their own judgment on matters of racial equality, women's rights, war, and the environment in deference to some prescribed "correct" view on these matters that will distance them from the stigma of America's sinful past.

gives us a road to the decency and legitimacy we want while sparing us the difficulty and struggle of true virtue. Dissociation turns virtue into a mask. It gives us the means to construct a "face of The Good." It counts the mere mouthing of glossy ideas of The Good the same as an honest struggle toward what is actually possible.

The new liberalism that emerged in the 1960s actually coveted responsibility for black problems—or at least the illusion of responsibility—because there was so much moral and political power in the idea of delivering blacks from their tragic past. This

Moynihan's unpardonable sin was to threaten liberal power by working from the assumption that blacks could be the agents of their own fates despite all the victimization they had endured.

Liberalism in the twenty-first century is, for the most part, a moral manipulation that exaggerates inequity and unfairness in American life in order to justify overreaching public policies and programs.

Could a public official, for example, discuss the weakening of personal responsibility and the work ethic (two timeless values) in some segments of the black community as even a partial cause of the academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in American schools? Of course not. It is simply unthinkable.

And so modern liberalism is grounded in a paradox: it tries to be "progressive" and forward looking by fixing its gaze backward. It insists that America's shameful past is the best explanation of its current social problems. It looks at the present, but it sees only the past.

By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the "victims" to the "guilty." This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.

Through this liberalism, the government took a kind of benevolent dominion over the fate of minorities and the poor, not to genuinely help them (which would require asking from them the hard work and sacrifice that real development requires), but to achieve immunity for the government from the taint of the past.

Buckley was not dismissive of this outrage; he simply proceeded as if it were interesting but not really relevant.

was almost formulaic: independence, a quick lull in which high hopes prevailed, and then years, if not decades, of civil war, strongmen dictators, atrocities, and coups.

But of course this only tries to make a magic out of being black, as if racial self-love and solidarity were the same thing as individual will and character—as if "black pride" could do the individual's hard work of developing into a person who can compete successfully in the modern world.

As the formerly oppressed move into greater and greater freedom, they are often more wedded to the idea of themselves as oppressed than to the reality that they are freer than ever.

The victim of oppression is always, and understandably, startled and resentful of the anxieties and burdens that new freedom entails—its call to greater responsibility, discipline, and sacrifice. But there it is.

Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise.