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Shelby Steele (born January 1, 1946) is an American author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. His books: https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=U...
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.
Steele was born in Chicago to a black father and a white mother. His father, Shelby Sr., a truck driver, met his mother, Ruth, a social worker, while working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His twin brother is Claude Steele, who is currently Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UC Berkeley, and formerly the former dean of the School of Education at Stanford University.
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, during his junior year at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was one of 18 black students in his class. Steele was active in SCOPE, a group linked to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he met Rita at an activist meeting. In 1968, Steele graduated from Coe and went on to earn his master's degree in sociology from Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville. Steele attended the University of Utah, where he taught black literature and studied for his Ph.D. After earning a Ph.D. in English in 1974, Steele was offered a tenured position at the university but turned it down owing to hostility encountered as part of an interracial couple in Utah. Steele accepted a position at San Jose State University as a professor of English literature, teaching there from 1974 to 1991.
Steele is a self-described "black conservative".[3] He opposes movements 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, second, by group preferences mandated by the government that discourage self-agency and personal responsibility in blacks.[4]
“ 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.[4] ”
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, while 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."
Books The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Harper Perennial. 1991-09-01. ISBN 0-06-097415-X. A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Harper Perennial. 1998-11-01. ISBN 0-06-093104-3. White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. HarperCollins]. 2006-05-02. ISBN 0-06-057862-9. A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. HarperCollins. 2007-12-04. ISBN 1-4165-5917-5.