Quotes from Shelby Steele

But hypocrisy is established when evil is clearly visible through the fog of rationalization—when rationalization is seen for what it is. So hypocrisy is not an act of evil; it is the pretense of innocence even as one is clearly in league with evil, and with all the duplicities and deceptions that serve evil.

When I called him a racist, I shocked him with what was then still a novel idea in race relations: that racism thrived by passing itself off as a kind of decency, a noblesse oblige.

had shown a light on his little evil through the fog of his rationalizations.

It is often the victim's fate to be victimized a second time by the moral neediness of his former victimizer. One can chalk up many of black America's problems since the 1960s precisely to this phenomenon. The larger society around us—having acknowledged its abuse of us—wants to take charge of our fate in order to redeem itself, thus smothering us in social programs and policies that rob us of full autonomy all over again.

It was far more a cultivated ignorance of America's sins than innocence of them, and this ignorance was helped along by a culturally embedded pattern of rationalizations, bigotries, stereotypes, and lies.

The leverage we gained by relying on America's sense of fallenness came at the price of taking on, and then living with, an identity of grievance and entitlement.

Now I could shame and silence whites at will. With this moral authority there was the power to better defend myself against racism, but there was also a new, abusive power very similar to the abusive power that had been wielded against me—a power of racial privilege deriving solely from the color of my skin. This power to shame, silence, and muscle concessions from the larger society on the basis of past victimization became the new "black power.

It left us pleading with the government, not for freedom, which we had already won, but for "programs" and "preferences" that would be a ladder to full equality.

But in fact, blacks ran into all manner of discrimination in sports and music. They simply would not be deterred. Their excellence and merit ultimately prevailed over all else.

Diversity is about dissociation and legitimacy for American institutions, not the development of former victims.

Thus, in a culture won over by dissociation, conservatism seems to be in association with America's evil past.

White racism had made my race the limit of my individuality. But now the new black consciousness I was learning from people like Gregory wanted me to voluntarily, even proudly, do the same thing that racism had done: make my race more important than my individuality

The American democracy simply could not move forward after the civil rights era without adding to its great democratic principles an explicit social morality based on the insight that racism is immoral.

Poetic truth—this assertion of a broad characteristic "truth" that invalidates actual truth—is contemporary liberalism's greatest source of power. It is also liberalism's most fundamental corruption.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

there also comes a time when he must stop thinking of himself as a victim by acknowledging that—existentially—his fate is always in his own hands.

To be a proud and militant black after the sixties, you screamed black power in order to induce the application of white power. And you lived by an ethic that still sees full responsibility as oppression, if not racism, when applied to blacks. Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement.

It is also the formula that keeps black America underdeveloped even as we enjoy new freedom and a proliferation of opportunity. No worse fate could befall a group emerging from oppression than to find itself gripped by a militancy that sees justice in making others responsible for its advancement.

It was the first truly profound strategic mistake we made in our long struggle for complete equality. It made us a "contingent people" whose fate depended on what others did for us.

despite all he had endured as a black in the South in the first half of the twentieth century, he taught the boys that America was rich in opportunities for blacks if they were willing to work.

One of the delights of Marxian-tinged ideas for the young is the unearned sense of superiority they grant.)

Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.

For black leaders in the age of white guilt the problem was how to seize all they could get from white guilt without having to show actual events of racism. Global racism was the answer. With it, the smallest racial incident proved the "global truth" of systemic racism.

The problem is that this "place" is in the past. And it does no good to adapt to a past that is only an echo now. There is no refuge there.