I know that whatever power Shelby Steele has always comes out of the writing. I'm not the greatest television pundit or the best public speaker, so it's my writing that's most important.

I wrote a piece in the New York Times back in the Nineties saying that racial discrimination ought to be a criminal offense, not just a civil one. I'm all for the criminalization of discrimination.

Too often the result of affirmative action has been an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of parity between blacks and whites that has not yet been achieved in reality...Preferences tend to attack one form of discrimination with another...Affirmative action encourages a victim-focused identity, and sends the message that there is more power in our past suffering than in our present achievements.

My problem with Obama is that he's not a new paradigm; he's an old paradigm. A new paradigm would be somebody like Harold Ford [former Democratic Congressman from Tennessee] or Michael Steele [former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland], no relation, both of whom present themselves as individuals, and don't seem to wear a mask. They don't 'bargain;' they don't 'challenge.' So, I see them as fresh, and as evidence of what I hope will be a new trend.

My experience in life tells me that the values that are now being labeled 'conservative' are the only way that blacks can get ahead.

Part of our identity is the idea that racism is still there and that we are vulnerable to it. So, the question is, 'How vulnerable?' In other words, is it really a problem for us, or is it just a small thing. How do you evaluate racism in America on a scale of 1 to 10? My suspicion is that most blacks overrate it a bit. Not to say it's not there, but we overrate it because this masking is part of our relationship to the larger society. This is a way we keep whites on the hook. We keep them obligated, and we keep ourselves entitled. There's an incentive, you see, to inflate it a little bit.

I would love to see us, as blacks, get to the place where we say, 'I'm not going to play race games with you. Here I am. This is who I am. Take it or leave it.'