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.

His first book, The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America, earned Steele a National Book Critics' Circle Award (1990). He subsequently wrote a number of books including White Guilt, A Dream Deferred and, most recently, Shame.

Steele won an Emmy for his writing on the 1991 documentary Seven Days in Bensonhurst. He is also the recipient of the National Humanities Medal (2004) and the Bradley Prize (2006).