"All-out opposition to diversity mounted when Allan Bloom fired a major salvo with his 1987 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. That same year, the National Association of Scholars in Princeton, New Jersey, was founded to defend "excellence" from extinction with the help of intellectuals like D'Souza and magazines like the Atlantic. The Anglo generals in the war soon had a few lieutenants of color, like African-American professor Shelby Steele of California State University in San Jose (and later Ward Connerly, also of California). Steele attacked affirmative action, saying it represented over-reliance by minorities and women on "the power of being victims." In its place we should follow the Horatio Alger formula for attaining success through individual responsibility and hard work. Not long after came a few Chicano academics who also advised Raza students to forget affirmative action; just stop whining, study hard and help your mom sell more tamales, you too could be Hispanics."
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Academics from the United StatesColumnists from the United StatesAfrican AmericansPeople from ChicagoSociologists from the United States
Original Language: English
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Sources
Elizabeth Martinez, De Colores Means All of Us (1998)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Shelby_Steele
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Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele (born 1 January 1946) is an American conservative writer and a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His columns and op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper's Magazine. In 1991 he won an Emmy, a Writers Guild award, and a San Francisco Film Festival award for his documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. In 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
13 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Shelby Steele →
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