A senior fellow who specializes in topics such as race relations at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, Shelby Steele grew up in an era of segregation in the 1950s and 1960s in the south side of Chicago. He lived across the street from white families all his life, but neither they nor his interracial family ever dared cross to the other side. After the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when black people were finally given the right to vote, Steele said it then came time for black people to finally be “left alone,” unaffected by racism and unburdened by the oppressiveness of liberalism.