Shelby Steele Quotes

Affirmative action is the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

We seek not just freedom, but opportunity … not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

We suspect that 25 years from now the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.

Labor has a proud history of tackling discrimination and introducing important social reform.

What we hope to achieve is a society that doesn't value a white man because he's a white man, but also doesn't value a woman because she's a woman, or a black because he's a black.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

I never doubted that equal rights was the right direction. Most reforms, most problems are complicated. But to me there is nothing complicated about ordinary equality.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

Affirmative action is a little like the professional football draft. The NFL awards its No. 1 draft choices to the lowest-ranked team in the league. It doesn't do this out of compassion or guilt. It's done for mutual survival. They understand that a league can only be as strong as its weakest team.

If you want peace, work for justice.

Equal opportunity does not come from tolerance; it comes from acceptance.

Our aim is a totally new and just constitutional dispension in which every inhabitant will enjoy equal rights, treatment and opportunity in every sphere of endeavour—constitutional, social and economic.

We seek ... not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.

establish and maintain equal opportunity and industrial justice.

Equal opportunity for all, special privilege for none.

Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability

It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for.