![]() | This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Shelby Steele | |
---|---|
![]() Steele receiving the National Medal of the Humanities in 2004 | |
Born | January 1, 1946 |
Alma mater | University of Utah Southern Illinois University Edwardsville Coe College |
Institutions | Hoover Institution San Jose State University |
Main interests | Racism, multiculturalism, affirmative action |
External image | |
---|---|
![]() |
Shelby Steele (born January 1, 1946) [1] is an author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action.
In 1990, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character. [2] In 2004, Steele was awarded the National Medal of the Humanities. [3] [4]
Steele was born in Phoenix, Illinois, a Cook County village off Chicago's South Side, to a black father and a white mother. His father, Shelby Sr., a truck driver with a third-grade education, and his mother, Ruth, a social worker, were founding members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Steele attended an all-black elementary school. [5] His paternal grandfather was born a slave in Kentucky. [6] His twin brother is Claude Steele, a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, who held leadership positions with UC Berkeley, Columbia University and Stanford. [7]
Steele received a B.A. in political science from Coe College, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. Steele met his wife, Rita Silverman, while they were students at Coe. [5] Steele was active in the SCOPE Project, a voter registration project of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he met Rita at an activist meeting.
Steele spent 20 years as an English professor at San Jose State University. [5]
Steele has been called a black conservative. [5] [8] He opposes policies such as affirmative action, which he considers to be unsuccessful liberal campaigns to promote equal opportunity for African Americans. He contends that blacks have been "twice betrayed:" first by slavery and oppression and then by group preferences mandated by the government, which discourage self-agency and personal responsibility in blacks. [9]
The great ingenuity of interventions like affirmative action has not been that they give Americans a way to identify with the struggle of blacks, but that they give them a way to identify with racial virtuousness quite apart from blacks. [9]
Steele believes that the use of victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans. In his view, white Americans see blacks as victims to ease their guilty conscience, and blacks attempt to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency that will purchase nothing of real or lasting value. Therefore, he claims, blacks must stop "buying into this zero-sum game" by adopting a "culture of excellence and achievement" without relying on "set-asides and entitlements." [9]
Steele wrote a short book, A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win, published in December 2007. The book contained Steele's analysis of Barack Obama's character as a child born to a mixed couple who then had to grow as a black man. [10] Steele concluded that Obama is a "bound man" to his "black identity." Steele gives this description of his conclusion:
There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth—its defining ideas of grievance and protest—become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness.
After Obama won the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Steele defended the content of the book and claimed its subtitle was a marketing device motivated by the publisher which he came up with "in about 30 seconds." [11] He explains Obama's victory by likening him to Louis Armstrong who donned the "bargainer's mask" in his bid for white acceptance. In his analysis, he takes whites, whom he claims have for decades been stigmatized as racist and had to prove they are not, "off the hook."
On Uncommon Knowledge, an interview program for the Hoover Institute hosted by Peter Robinson, he said: "White America has made tremendous moral progress since the '60s.... And they've never given themselves credit for that. And here is an opportunity at last to document this progress." [12]
Steele has been critical of what he describes as the "world opinion" of Israel. [13]
At every turn "world opinion," like a schoolmarm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation. Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.
What Killed Michael Brown? is a documentary film written and narrated by Shelby Steele and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele, which was scheduled to premiere on October 16, 2020. It addresses race relations in the United States and in particular an incident in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 involving Michael Brown. Steele has opined that there is "poetic truth" concerning the death of Michael Brown. Steele said: "The language—he was 'executed,' he was 'assassinated,' 'hands up, don't shoot'—it was a stunning example of poetic truth, of the lies that a society can entertain in pursuit of power." Steele additionally said: "In a microcosm, that's where race relations are today. The truth has no chance. It's smothered by the politics of victimization." Amazon initially rejected it for its Amazon Prime Video streaming service but later relented after coming under fire from op-eds in The Wall Street Journal and other publications. [14] [15] [16] [17]
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, author, and social commentator who is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
White guilt is a belief that white people bear a collective responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other racial groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.
The Magical Negro is a trope in American cinema, television, and literature. In the cinema of the United States, the Magical Negro is a supporting stock character who comes to the aid of white protagonists in a film. Magical Negro characters, who often possess special insight or mystical powers, have long been a tradition in American fiction.
Critical race theory (CRT) is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing how social and political laws and media shape social conceptions of race and ethnicity. CRT also considers racism to be systemic in various laws and rules, and not only based on individuals' prejudices. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming individuals.
Glenn Cartman Loury is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005. At the age of 33, Loury became the first African American professor of economics at Harvard University to gain tenure.
Black conservatism is a political and social philosophy rooted in communities of African descent that aligns largely with the conservative ideology around the world. Black conservatives emphasize traditionalism, patriotism, self-sufficiency, and strong cultural and social conservatism within the context of the black church. In the United States it is often, but not exclusively, associated with the Republican Party.
Claude Mason Steele is a social psychologist and emeritus professor at Stanford University, where he is the I. James Quillen Endowed Dean, Emeritus at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education, and Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emeritus.
In the United States, acting white is a pejorative term, usually applied to Black people, which refers to a person's perceived betrayal of their culture by assuming the social expectations of white society. It can be applied to success in education, but this view is highly debated. In 2020, 93.6% of African-Americans between 25 and 39 had a high school diploma, on par with the national average, though African-Americans have a higher tendency to drop out from college than their white peers.
Charles James Ogletree Jr. was an American legal scholar who served as the Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, where he was the founder of the school's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice. He was also the author of books on legal topics.
In the United States, affirmative action consists of government-mandated, government-approved, and voluntary private programs granting special consideration to historically excluded groups, specifically racial minorities and women. These programs tend to focus on access to education and employment in order to redress the disadvantages associated with past and present discrimination. Another goal of affirmative action policies is to ensure that public institutions, such as universities, hospitals, and police forces, are more representative of the populations they serve.
Randall LeRoy Kennedy is an American legal scholar. He is the Michael R. Klein Professor of Law at Harvard University and his research focuses on the intersection of racial conflict and legal institutions in American life. He specializes in contracts, freedom of expression, race relations law, civil rights legislation, and the Supreme Court.
"A More Perfect Union" is the title of a speech delivered by then-Senator Barack Obama on March 18, 2008, in the course of the contest for the 2008 Democratic Party presidential nomination. Speaking before an audience at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Obama was responding to a spike in the attention paid to controversial remarks made by Jeremiah Wright, his former pastor and, until shortly before the speech, a participant in his campaign. Obama framed his response in terms of the broader issue of race in the United States. The speech's title was taken from the Preamble to the United States Constitution.
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era is a book by American author Shelby Steele in 2006.
Multiracial Americans or mixed-race Americans are Americans who have mixed ancestry of two or more races. The term may also include Americans of mixed-race ancestry who self-identify with just one group culturally and socially. In the 2020 United States census, 33.8 million individuals or 10.2% of the population, self-identified as multiracial. There is evidence that an accounting by genetic ancestry would produce a higher number.
In the United States, black conservatism is a political and social movement rooted in communities of African descent that aligns largely with the American conservative movement, including the Christian right. Black conservatism emphasizes social conservatism, traditionalism, patriotism, capitalism, and free markets. What characterizes a "black conservative" has changed over time, and proponents do not necessarily share the same political philosophy.
White backlash, also known as white rage or whitelash, is related to the politics of white grievance, and is the negative response of some white people to the racial progress of other ethnic groups in rights and economic opportunities, as well as their growing cultural parity, political self-determination, or dominance.
Post-racial United States is a theoretical environment in which the United States is free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice.
Race relations is a sociological concept that emerged in Chicago in connection with the work of sociologist Robert E. Park and the Chicago race riot of 1919. Race relations designates a paradigm or field in sociology and a legal concept in the United Kingdom. As a sociological field, race relations attempts to explain how racial groups relate to each other. These relations vary depending on historical, social, and cultural context. The term is used in a generic way to designate race related interactions, dynamics, and issues.
Richard Henry Sander is a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law and a critic of affirmative action, primarily known for the mismatch theory.
Matthew Windust Hughey is an American sociologist known for his work on race and racism. He is Professor of Sociology at the University of Connecticut, where he is also an adjunct faculty member in the Africana Studies Institute; American Studies Program; Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, & Policy; Sustainable Global Cities Initiative, and; graduate certificate program in Indigeneity, Race, Ethnicity, & Politics. His work has included studying whiteness, race and media, race and politics, racism and racial assumptions within genetic and genomic science, and racism and racial identity in white and black American fraternities and sororities.
writer Shelby Steele in 1946 (age 73)