Shelby Steele Quotes

You know, bigotry isn't relevant to just the South. It never was. But I'm very grateful that I don't know what it's like from experience.

There's nothing worse, I guess, than being black in an all-white church or being southern and being a liberal.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

If you are serious about American culture and you are serious about Afro-American culture, you are in a lot of pain. You are not - you are not smiling about it.

If black people mistrust white people, they are mistrusting racism, and that is appropriate.

Black people must address itself to the causes of poverty. That's oppression in this country.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

The white man, in his press, is going to identify me with 'hate.'

Nobody would take checks from Indians, nobody would give them any credit, and nobody would let them drink in the bars. There was a rudeness, a brusqueness, with which the Indians were treated constantly. At a very young age, that had entered my consciousness.

We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.

It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

NO COLORED CLERKS IN COLORED NEIGHBORHOODS., STAY OUT!

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

As long as the waving symbol of another American’s pride is the shameful symbol of another American’s pain, we have bridges to cross in this country and we better get across them.

So long as the slave remains ignorant and docile and contented he is taken care of, humored and spoken of with a contemptuous, compassionate kindness. But from the moment he exhibits the attributes of a rational being, from the moment his intellect seems likely to come into the most distant competition with that of whites, the most deadly hatred springs up—not in the black, but in his oppressors.

What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country -- a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired.... What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.

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

There is some group of Americans who are really, really curious to understand how we ended up at this point, where every week it seems like you can turn on your TV and see some sort of abuse being heaped on black people.

I am not, and never have been, a member of the 'White Establishment.'

Most of my experience with racism comes from living in the South.

Like so many of you, I am deeply distressed both by the hateful violence in Charlottesville and by President Trump's refusal to clearly denounce it. Nobody with any empathy for the plight of people of color in this country could respond the way he did.