A Quote by Shelby Steele

What is political correctness, if not essentially redemptive speech? Soon liberalism had become a cultural identity that offered Americans a way to think of themselves as decent people. To be liberal was to be good.
Will his work survive? Alas, I worry that it will not. As an American liberal with impeccable credentials, I would like to say that political correctness is going to kill American liberalism if it is not fought to the death by people like me for the dangers it represents to free speech, to the exchange of ideas, to openheartedness, or to the spirit of art itself. Political correctness has a stranglehold on academia, on feminism, and on the media. It is a form of both madness and maggotry, and has already silenced the voices of writers like James Dicky across the land.
The identity of just one thing, the "clash of civilization" view that you're a Muslim or a Hindu or a Buddhist or a Christian, I think that's such a limited way of seeing humanity, and schools have the opportunity to bring out the fact that we have hundreds of identities. We have our national identity. We have our cultural identity, linguistic identity, religious identity. Yes, cultural identity, professional identity, all kinds of ways.
Unless you think hard about political questions in our culture, you are liberal by default. You have to think your way out of liberalism.
Americans of good-will, the nice decent church people, the well-meaning liberals, the good hearted souls who themselves wouldn't lynch anyone, must begin to realize that they have to be more than passively good-hearted, more than church goingly Christian, and much more than word-of-mouth in the liberalism.
Since the main problem that American, the Afro- Americans have is a lack of cultural identity. It is necessary to teach [people] that they had some type of identity, culture, civilization before they were brought here.
I think the press, by and large, is what we call "liberal". But of course what we call "liberal" means well to the right. "Liberal" means the "guardians of the gates". So the New York Times is "liberal" by, what's called, the standards of political discourse, New York Times is liberal, CBS is liberal. I don't disagree. I think they're moderately critical at the fringes. They're not totally subordinate to power, but they are very strict in how far you can go. And in fact, their liberalism serves an extremely important function in supporting power.
I never understood liberal Jews blaming Israel, you know, supporting Palestinians. I've never understood it, until I spoke once to a man named Norman Podhoretz, and he said to me, "Many of you refer to liberal Jews that way. They're not Jews. They are liberals. Liberalism is what is first and foremost in their identity. The fact that they are Jews is not paramount or prominent. It's secondary - and, in many cases, even tertiary - to their identity."
Liberals are not about choice; they are about imposition. The way they live, the way they believe, must be imposed on people, otherwise they won’t do it on their own,” he added. “It’s taken them 50, 60 years to get to this point of conditioning people, of taking hold of the education system, the university, academia system, the media. It’s taken a long time to condition people not to stand up for themselves, not to exercise freedom, not to speak outside the acceptable norms. What is political correctness but speech censorship, is all it is.
Political correctness gets in the way of all too many things in this country of ours, I am not a subscriber of political correctness by any means, shape or form.
Political correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent this idea of people who are politically correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That's all part of being a decent human being.
The Liberal Party abandoned the principles of reform and social liberalism and has become, instead, just another piece of political machinery in the service of corporatism.
Political correctness has changed everything. People forget that political correctness used to be called spastic gay talk.
As much as some people like to put down 'political correctness,' if it wasn't for political correctness, I wouldn't be free right now.
Don't you just hate it when the war on terrorism interferes with political correctness and liberalism's equality fetish?
It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible for a democracy to govern with a total lack of liberalism. Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism.
The more people that understand and are made able to spot liberalism, and then the more people are able to associate liberalism with the problems in their lives, the political problems, the economic problems, the more people can be conditioned and educated to understand that liberalism is the problem, coupled with the ability to spot it, would be the fastest way to eradicate it. It would be really helpful if we had a Republican Party engaged in this.
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