Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who writes extensively about race relations after growing up in segregated Chicago in the 1960s, decried the unrest roiling the nation in the weeks since George Floyd’s death.
“It breaks my heart to see young people, Black Lives Matter, angry and still going over this victimization as though that is the truth of who we are as a people,” Steele said on Fox News’s The Story with Martha MacCallum. “[It’s] that we have been victims. What a sad thing to think. What a sad way to think of yourself. And this has gone on to the point where it’s just painful to see. I want to see young people embracing freedom. Your contribution to your race is what you make of yourself. It’s not what your identity gives to you. It’s what you give to your identity.”
Steele has been outspoken on his opposition of expanded government programs aimed at benefiting the lives of black Americans. Steele opposed a push by Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear seeking better healthcare coverage for black people, claiming he is using the promise of government aid for political gain.
“Whites win their innocence and their power by deferring to some difficulty that minorities have,” Steele said. “Well, we’ve had 60 years of deference, the Great Society programs, war on poverty, affirmative action, school busing, public housing. We have had all of that. We are further behind now that we were back then, back in the ‘50s, in the early ‘60s, because it’s not about us. It is about this governor winning power for himself, appeasing what he thinks his voters want to hear. We are just a tool that he uses in that sense.”
Steele also discussed the breakdown of marriage and the family as the biggest barrier to success for black communities.
“Our central problem is the breakdown of the family,” Steele said. “Seventy-five percent of all black children are born out of wedlock. They don’t have a father. They are very few men around in the community. When I was growing up, men were everywhere. Everybody had a dad. A good one or a bad one, but they had one. They perform a great service, they’re irreplaceable. There is no social program, government intervention that is going to take the place of that. We, as black people, need to put more focus and use our imagination to reinforce the institution of marriage and family. That, right there, think of the kind of improvement that would make. I would much rather see us talk about that then, again, about the police.”
