From the Always Eloquent Shelby Steele

Shelby Steele is a scholar at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. He writes syndicated columns for the online magazine Townhall.com, a website makes no secret about its politically conservative affiliations, and has written columns that have graced the pages of most major American newspapers.


He has also written a few bestsellers, most recently a book entitled "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007). This book was released late in 2007 during the peak President Obama's Democratic primary campaign. I have not had the pleasure of reading this book. However, Steele's main argument is that, as a candidate, President Barack Obama was stuck in the very precarious position of trying to transcend racial politics, i.e. not conforming to the battle lines that were drawn during the divisive racial issues during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, while also trying to also benefit from being a minority. I'll leave the topic of whether President Obama succeeded at this delicate balance alone for now---obviously President Obama beat Hillary Clinton by a hair in the Democratic primary election and then demolished the human toothache that is Senator John McCain in the general election. Therefore, Mr. Steele's prediction that Obama couldn't win did not hold true.

Several years ago, Shelby Steele brilliantly wrote "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era." This book, along with Thomas Sowell's "The Economics of Politics and Race," has done much to shape my thinking about racial issues. "White Guilt" describes the struggles of Black Americans during the Civil Rights movement--a movement whose goal was to end discrimination by eradicating the barriers to the political process. However, the Civil Rights movement--and even the language that is used to frame the arguments--has mutated into a system in which Black Americans now demand certain privileges over Caucasians and other minority groups. Furthermore, there exists a class of politicians, academics, and others who specialize in giving these privileges to achieve at least the appearance of racial harmony.

Steele argues that the net effect of this 'new' Civil Rights movement is detrimental to the plight of Black Americans. A "victimization" and "inferiority" complex has been ingrained in their subconscious. They cannot achieve anything on their own and need someone else's help to do it. An overwhelming amount of institutional biases and prejudices exist: racist employers, trigger-happy police, stealth Jim Crow laws---we have all heard these before---so there for the system is set up for you to fail.

But the departure from the true essence of the Civil Rights movement is worse than that. Black leaders such as Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton have gotten into the business of race-hustling. They inherently believe that all Caucasians are racist unless they perpetually demonstrate otherwise. And anyone who utters so much as three-word phrase that doesn't comport with the Reverends' rules of engagement for racial discussions? Be prepared to be shaken down with demands for an apology, bad publicity, a lawsuit, or much worse.

Furthermore, the aforementioned politicians and elite opinion leaders now assume that Blacks ARE inferior and need help. They can't just level the playing field and make everyone play fairly. They have to prove their magnanimity--actually they have to prove to race-hustlers that they aren't racist--by creating a system of racial preferences, quotas, and other set-asides. Therefore, the race-hustlers and elites are creating a system they originally set out to destroy: a world in which Black Americans are dependent on others for advancement and progress.

According to Wikipedia, Shelby Steele is a self-described "Black Conservative." The citation for this is Shelby Steele's first book "The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America." I have not read this book to determine whether the citation is correct--I have often had quarrels with the veracity of Wikipedia. However, I HAVE read "White Guilt" and in the book Mr. Steele devotes a number of paragraphs to conservatism vs liberalism. Like me, Mr. Steele sneers at any accusations that he is a conservative (Note: I wrote about contemporary modern conservatism here). However, by today's contemporary definitions of conservatism and liberalism, anyone who opposes affirmative action or Aid to Families With Dependent Children--or most Great Society programs, for that matter--would probably be described by the commentariat and the punditocracy as a Conservative.

Mr. Steele wrote a passionate article in today's Wall Street Journal about the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor here:

Sotomayor and the Politics of Race

The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America's first black president, and a man promising the "new," we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.

This contradiction has always been at the heart of the Obama story. On the one hand there was the 2004 Democratic Convention speech proclaiming "only one America." And on the other hand there was the race-baiting of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Does this most powerful man on earth know himself well enough to resolve this contradiction and point the way to a genuinely post-racial America?

I would love some feedback on this article. Thanks!

Update: The boys at Powerlineblog.com reviewed A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win here. They elaborate on two categories of racialists: bargainers and challengers.

Steele views Obama as the first black politician to ride the strategy of "bargaining" to great success. For Steele, bargaining is one of two approaches blacks have used as a "mask" in order to offset the power differential between blacks and whites. He considers Louis Armstrong the first great bargainer with white America. Armstrong's deal was, I will entertain you without pretending to be your equal. His mask, partly borrowed from the minstrel tradition, included the famous smile and laughter.

Today the bargain that works is this: I will presume that you're not a racist and by loving me you'll show that my presumption is correct. Blacks who offer this bargain are betting on white decency, and whites love this.

For Steele, bargainers include Bill Cosby, Tiger Woods (to some extent), and best of all Oprah Winfrey. The power of the bargain, which is founded on white Americas overwhelming desire to get beyond racism, is capable of creating "iconic Negroes." It confers an almost magical quality on its best practitioners, such as Oprah. This is manifested in the ability to sell almost any product to whites.

Leading politicians have adopted another mask, that of the "challenger." They presume that whites are racist until they prove otherwise by conferring tangible benefits on them. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are paradigm challengers. The challenger strategy works beautifully in an institutional setting -- say a university -- but less well on a mass scale. Still, black politicians often prefer this approach because not adopting it leads to suspicion among black leaders and their constituents. They fear that if whites are let off the hook too easily, black power will be diminished.

Obama, of course, is a bargainer, and to Steele this is the source of his almost magical appeal and meteoric political rise. Obama has figured out how to ride the great wave available to very talented blacks who tap into white yearning to get well beyond America's racist past.