Shelby Steele's New Book: Is Obama A Black Poseur?

From the blog Bookerising

Shelby Steele, the black conservative scholar at the Hoover Institution and best-selling author of The Content Of Our Character, has a new book out next week called A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama And Why He Can't Win. -Mr. Steele, who, Senator Barack Obama is the offspring of a white mother and black father, argues that the liberal Illinois Democrat's quest for the U.S. presidency is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics. It is one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America.

According to the book description on Simon & Schuster's website, Mr. Steele argues that poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Sen. Obama's presidential bid pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by America's painful racial history -- a morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence.

Mr. Steele outlines how Sen. is caught between the two classic "mask" postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. The "mask" is designed to appease White America's fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace what they view as a nonthreatening black person and vote for him.

John McWhorter, the moderate-liberal commentator who reviewed Mr. Steele's book yesterday for the New York Sun, wrote: "Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele argues that underneath Mr. Obama's cool-tempered exterior is a soul divided against itself. Specifically, Mr. Steele suspects that Mr. Obama has crafted an oppositional 'black' identity of a staged variety, despite having been raised by whites in a culture disconnected from the black American community.....However, Mr. Steele is more interested in Mr. Obama's attempts at embracing a 'black identity' in more overt ways, such as watching him join the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, presided over by a black minister caught up in pretending race relations in America have barely inched beyond 1956.

Mr. Steele sees these kinds of acts as emblematic of a bind black America is caught in, pretending an allegiance to a separatist, victim-based 'black ideology' despite the fact that the only way to true success in America is via mainstream values focusing on hard work and coping with obstacles as they come."More from Mr. McWhorter's review: "Mr. Steele pegs Mr. Obama as pretending in the same way [as the 1960s black-power movement]. He usefully points out, 'It was not a 'Black Value System' that prepared Mr. Obama so well for the world,' and asks, 'Doesn't Mr. Obama's success make the precise point that 'blackness' is a dead-end?'

In the end, Mr. Steele writes, Mr. Obama 'simply cannot acknowledge the full truth of his own experience,' because to do so would be to sacrifice the appeal of his 'blackness.' As a candidate, then, 'He is bound against himself.'"Mr. Steele apparently argues that Sen. Obama is too constrained by these identity battles to find his true political voice.

While Mr. Steele believes that Sen. Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail, he is a Promethean figure and thus a bound man. In describing the cross-pressures facing Sen. Obama, Mr. Steele writes: "The problem here for Barack, of course, is that his racial identity commits him to a manipulation of the society he seeks to lead. To 'be black,' he has to exaggerate black victimization in America....Worse, his identity will pressure him to see black difficulties -- achievement gaps, high crime rates ... -- in the old framework of racial oppression."Mr. McWhorter's review challenges some of Mr. Steele's assumptions: "

As always, Mr. Steele's general perspective is dead-on, and rendered in his inimitably lapidary and penetrating fashion. However, Mr. Obama is less totemic a figure than Mr. Steele implies, and his character does not fit as neatly into Mr. Steele's schema as 'Bound Man' suggests. The first problem is Mr. Steele's psychological analysis of Mr. Obama. Mr. Steele implies that maintaining a distinct 'black identity' is a kind of 'strategy,' shored up by people who need, for career or emotional reasons, to capitalize on whites' desire for absolution from bigotry. Mr. Steele is correct that nothing in Mr. Obama's background furnishes a logical basis for a genuine black identity.

However, his surmise that Mr. Obama must therefore be driven by something peculiar and tragic — such as a quest to compensate for the absence of his Kenyan father — is something of a stretch. As a politician Mr. Obama must engage with the larger public, and the fact is that most black Americans were not raised by whites, as Mr. Obama was. In addressing them as a 'black' man, Mr. Obama is likely trying to build a bridge between his life story and theirs. Mr. Steele assumes that, deep down, Mr. Obama would like to preach the message of self-reliance that Bill Cosby has been airing of late.

However, this misses that Mr. Obama is naturally given to attempting to square circles. That is, he is an intellectual capable of seeing all sides of an issue, and seeking common ground, rather than seeing only ideological divides."More critique from Mr. McWhorter about Mr. Steele's book: "At times Mr. Steele's analysis, so focused on Mr. Obama as a racial entity as to miss Mr. Obama the individual, verges on falling into the very racial essentialism that he condemns in Mr. Obama and his fans.Then, on the other hand, Mr. Steele contends that despite his gestural outreach to the 'Soul Patrol,' Mr. Obama is nevertheless not 'black' enough to arouse enough of the black electorate in the primaries to get the nomination.

However, it would be hard to say that Mr. Obama is running for president in the deracinated guise of a Sidney Poitier in 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.' He does, after all, attend a church run by a black radical. He worked up the black crowd at the latest Selma anniversary by referring to his debt to what the marchers there achieved ('Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama'). He talks to black audiences in 'blackcent' cadences, which he learned neither on his white mother's knee nor in Hawaii or Indonesia, but as a second language.

Of course, there are those voters for whom only someone like Al Sharpton would be a 'really black' presidential candidate. But this is a fringe contingent, and black voters were uninspired by Mr. Sharpton when he actually did make a run. Blacks currently unsure whether they will vote for him most commonly cite unfamiliarity as the reason. This suggests that Mr. Obama is trailing Hillary Clinton in the polls among blacks more because his rise to fame has been so rapid than because black voters could only be aroused by black candidates with the politics of Cynthia McKinney."Mr. Steele asserts that Americans are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian that we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think about racial matters.

Like Sen. Obama, he asserts, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Sen. Obama emerges as a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to accept and honor what we honestly feel about race. In A Bound Man , Mr. Steele also proposes a way for Sen. Obama to break these bonds and find his own voice.Mr. McWhorter concludes his review: "Mr. Steele's book is brilliant in many passages. Yet his larger argument does not convince me that Mr. Obama, or someone like him, could not be in the Oval Office one day."