Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He was appointed a Hoover fellow in 1994. Steele has written widely on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations.

Steele is the author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era and A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, in which he argues that too much of what has been done since the Great Society in the name of black rights has far more to do with the moral redemption or self-satisfaction of whites than with any real improvement in the lives of blacks. Steele has also written extensively for major publications, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and he is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine. He has spoken before hundreds of groups and has appeared on Nightline and 60 Minutes.

In 2006, Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. In 1991, his work on the documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst was recognized with an Emmy Award and two awards for television documentary writing—the Writer's Guild Award and the San Francisco Film Festival Award. Steele received the National Book Critic's Circle Award in 1990 in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America.