Shelby Steele: 'Liberalism Is Biggest Threat to Our Culture'

Striking back at "liberalism" as taking advantage of blacks on "idealisms" such as "diversity" and "inclusion," African American author Shelby Steele told The Daily Caller that "leftism really retards development."

"Liberalism is our biggest threat to our culture and our way of life," Steele told TDC.

"I think the left causes people to sell themselves out to identity and all sorts of ideas and idealisms and so forth. The left encourages them to take these multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, all these sorts of things, and identify with them and give themselves a self esteem based on these empty idealisms that have no connection to reality."

Steele, author "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," speaks to helping black Americans "dealing with reality" instead of what's "holding me back."

"Leftism really retards development, as in human development," Steele told TDC. "The more you get stuck in them, the less you grow, the less you develop.

"They become parts of the personality that are just lazy."

Steele added "selling" blacks as "victimized" and "entitled" is the "kiss of death" that will hold them back.

"America has tried to sell blacks – I think to save itself – to sell blacks on this idea you're a victim, that's your authenticity, the most authentic thing about you as a black person is that you come from a victimized and entitled group," Steele told TDC. "That's the kiss of death.

"You believe that, you're going nowhere. You're not going to learn anything. You're stopped in your tracks. You can't do a worse thing to someone than to impose on them that kind of identity – as white Americans often do as a way to winning back moral authority to themselves.

"It's a selfish thing to do. It's pernicious."

Steele, who struck back at colleges and universities that refuse to allow him to share his message, also issued a rebuke to using diversity as modern form of "slavery."

"The slave master didn't do that: He demanded labor; he may beat you, but he didn't take your soul," Steeled told TDC. "He didn't tell you who you were as a human being. But today, liberalism does that."

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