Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

Work Success Society

White America's live under this accusation that they're racist, they need to prove that they're not racist. In order to prove that you're not racist, you need to take over the fate of black people and say, go with us, we'll engineer you into the future, we'll engineer you into equality.

Shelby Steele

Future Equality You

As many have noted, Donald Trump's presidency is an insurgency. Mr. Trump himself is the quintessential insurgent, doing battle with a disingenuous and entrenched establishment.

Shelby Steele

Men Wit Us

Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.

Shelby Steele

History Age Will

The evil of slavery and colonialism was that these oppressions kept their victims out of history, disconnected them from the evolutionary struggle.

Shelby Steele

History Victims Victim

Thomas Sowell, among many others, has articulated the power of individual responsibility as an antidote to black poverty for over 40 years. Black thinkers as far back as Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington have done the same.

Shelby Steele

Power Art Years

The 'safe spaces' for minority students on university campuses are actually redemptive spaces for white students and administrators looking for innocence and empowerment.

Shelby Steele

Space Power Men

The Great Society wanted to make America look like a country in which Little Rock could never have happened. It failed because it was a venture in denial rather than in realistic social transformation.

Shelby Steele

Society Great Which

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.

Shelby Steele

Zen Would United States

In talking with affirmative-action administrators and with blacks and whites in general, I found that supporters of affirmative action focus on its good intentions and detractors emphasize its negative effects. It was virtually impossible to find people outside either camp.

Shelby Steele

Good Wit Whites

Hatred is a transformative power. It can make the innocuous into the menacing.

Shelby Steele

Power Men Us

Well, protest is central to the evolution of black American culture. It was protest that really finally won our freedom for us. Beyond that, it's always interesting to note that it expanded the idea of democracy.

Shelby Steele

Freedom Won Well

Where race is concerned, America has had a horrible, a wretched history and that came to account in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights victories and Civil Rights Bill and housing and so forth.

Shelby Steele

History Wit Where

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.

Shelby Steele

Time Pet Write

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.

Shelby Steele

Sad Freedom Change

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.

Shelby Steele

Power Men Faith

Since the 1960s, when America finally became fully accountable for its past, deference toward all groups with any claim to past or present victimization became mandatory. The Great Society and the War on Poverty were some of the first truly deferential policies.

Shelby Steele

War Society Great

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

Shelby Steele

Men Life History

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

Shelby Steele

Will Ways Way

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.

Shelby Steele

Men Education Art

But on this 50th anniversary of the Little Rock crisis, it is important to remember that this evil did happen in America, and that no engineered redemption can make us innocent again. And we might also remember that it is better to be chastened than innocent.

Shelby Steele

I do not like the Confederate flag. It excludes me, profoundly. And if many good people fought honorably to defend it, I still experience the sight of it as a little racial aggression against me.

Shelby Steele

In Vietnam, America fought one whose communism was driven by an underlying nationalism, the desire to live free of the West. Whatever one may think of this, here was an enemy that truly wanted to live, that insisted on territory and sovereignty.

Shelby Steele

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

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?

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

White-on-black shootings evoke America's history of racism and so carry an iconic payload of menace. Black-on-black shootings carry no such payload, although they are truly menacing to the black community. They evoke only despair.

Shelby Steele

Normally, 'black responsibility' is a forbidden phrase for a black leader -- not because blacks reject responsibility, but because even the idea of black responsibility weakens moral leverage over whites.

Shelby Steele

Emmitt Till had walked into a cultural narrative in which his role was already tragically written. It was a narrative designed to preserve white supremacy. So it gave power - the right to kill - to any white claiming to defend the honor of white women.

Shelby Steele

My father bought three ramshackle houses, rebuilt them, rented them out, kept clawing his way up the ladder. A man with a third grade education from the south.

Shelby Steele

Activism is moral authority in redemptive liberalism.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

Especially for blacks, but also for many Hispanics, Native Americans, and Asian-Americans, group identity is now shaped more by a liberal politics in which past victimization is deferred to, and for which redress is sought with preferential treatment, than by a unified culture.

Shelby Steele

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

Shelby Steele

I think we have come to a place in black America, sadly from my point of view, where we have once again begun to rely on our history of victimization as our primary source of power to wield within society.

Shelby Steele

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

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Shelby Steele

Racial identity is simply forbidden to whites in America and across the entire Western world. Black children today are hammered with the idea of racial identity and pride, yet racial pride in whites constitutes a grave evil.

Shelby Steele

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

Shelby Steele

As an ideology - and certainly as a political identity - conservatism is less popular than the very principles and values it stands for.

Shelby Steele

I am a black American, I say, and thus announce my atavistic connection to all others who live as black Americans, to all who ever lived as black Americans. Religion, caste, class, gender and race can all be atavisms, and they are inherently anti-democratic because they exclude all outside the atavism.

Shelby Steele

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

Shelby Steele

Whites know never tell blacks what you really think and what you really feel because you risk being seen as a racist. And the result of that is that to a degree, we as blacks live in a bubble. Nobody tells us the truth. Nobody tells us what they would do if they were in our situation. Nobody really helps us.

Shelby Steele

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.

Shelby Steele

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

Shelby Steele

Liberalism is exhausted because it has become a corruption.

Shelby Steele