Shelby Steele
Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow

Expertise: Race relations, American social culture, identity politics

Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior 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.

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.

Steele's most recent book is White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (HarperCollins 2006). He is also the author of 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 written extensively for major publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine. He has also spoken before hundreds of groups and appeared on national current affairs news programs including Nightline and 60 Minutes.

Steele is a member of the National Association of Scholars, the national board of the American Academy for Liberal Education, the University Accreditation Association, and the national board at the Center for the New American Community at the Manhattan Institute.

Steele holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University, and a B.A. in political science from Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.