Quotes from Shelby Steele

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

It is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote. In fact both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so.

When America became stigmatized in the '60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else.

Freedom always carries a burden of proof, always throws us back on ourselves.

What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.

If this war makes anything clear, it is that Israel can do nothing to appease the Muslim animus against her.

Deference has been codified in American life as political correctness. And political correctness functions like a despotic regime. It is an oppressiveness that spreads its edicts further and further into the crevices of everyday life.

Liberal criticism of George W. Bush's minority cabinet and staff selections reveals just how much the left has come to rely on the manipulation of group identity in America as a means to political power.

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

I will take Al Sharpton seriously. And I know him, he's a nice, nice person.

You know, one of the ways we adapted to not being free was to think that our group identity was again, the way we were being black, and being down with the cards. That was the way we were going to get it. Unity was everything.

Without an ugly America to loathe, there is no automatic esteem to receive. Thus liberalism's unrelenting current of anti-Americanism.

Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past.

Opportunity follows struggle. It follows effort. It follows hard work. It doesn't come before.

Our great presidents have been stewards, men who broadly identified with the whole of America.

You are, in fact, stigmatized as a racist, because, after all, you have know acknowledged that your nation practiced racism explicitly for four centuries. And, now, since the '60s, white Americans have been grappling with the stigma, trying prove that they are not racist, to prove the negative.

I grew up black in segregated America, where it was hard to find an open door. It's harder now for young blacks to find a closed one.

Now, white America is using blacks, exploiting them, enabling their dependency so that they can say, we are innocent of racism, and therefore we are legitimate.

John McCain is simply a man of considerable character, poor guy. He is utterly bereft of cultural cachet.

Even the humble black grandmother, who sings in the church choir and struggles to raise a grandchild abandoned to her care, must assert ideological liberalism in order to make others comfortable about her blackness.

Well, when you think about it black American culture evolved over three and a half centuries. Every minute under which they lived under oppression and they adapted to dealing with the fact that those freedoms were going to be cut off. They had to somehow make a life within all of those restriction, and they did.

We are a nation with a powerful investment in the idea of our own fundamental innocence. Our can-do optimism and ingenuity are based on the faith that we are a decent, open, and generous people. This is our identity.

There's a little racism out here, always was, and always will be.

Conservatism is the perfect antidote to underdevelopment. Its commitment to individual responsibility, education, hard work, personal initiative, traditional family values and free markets is a universal formula for success in a free society.