Quotes of the Day - Shelby Steele

In honor of Black History Month, I'm featuring QsOTD from Black conservatives. Today's conservative is Shelby Steele, an author, columnist, and documentary film maker. He is also a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

He is was awarded the Bradley Prize in 2006, The National Humanities Medal in 2004 and an Emmy in 1991 for his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst.

Steele describes himself as a Black conservative in his book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. At the Hoover Institution, he specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action and has written extensively about "race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations."

Quotes from Shelby Steele:

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.

I believe that freedom of the individual — as opposed to good works or 'social justice' — is by far the highest goal any society can strive for. I became a conservative precisely to deal with my fate as a black American born into a segregated society. Racism had deprived me of individual freedom as I grew up in segregated America. But then as segregation faded there followed a flood of good works intended to make up for the past: school busing; welfare that asked nothing of its beneficiaries; racial preferences at universities that did not discriminate; and amorphous, do-good concepts like 'diversity' that are merely a license to shallow social engineering — to arranging an optics of race and gender harmony.

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

The problem with all these liberal good works is that they associate blackness with permanent inferiority. They don’t really believe in the fundamental human equality of the people they claim to help. They want to be valued for their good intentions, never for their effectiveness in uplift. I grew to hate these programs and policies because they not only believed in my inferiority more than my capacity for excellence, but they also encouraged me to use black weakness — the inferiority imposed by four centuries of brutal oppression — as leverage and entitlement in the larger society.

The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.

Modern liberalism seduces blacks with an idea of justice into an investment in our own historically imposed inferiority, as though it was a kind of talent. Only conservatism gave me a shot at true human equality. Possibly the greatest irony in American political culture is that conservatism — even today — is stigmatized as oppressive to minorities when, in fact, it is literally our only road ahead. We already have equality under the law. Only contemporary conservatism — which simply wants fairness by individuals rather than by groups — offers us the chance for true dignity, for freedom from both bigotry and paternalism.

Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.

It is time for blacks to begin the shift from a wartime to a peacetime identity, from fighting for opportunity to the seizing of it.

Do not hurt your neighbor, for it is not him you wrong but yourself.