WASHINGTON -- America's foremost black intellectual has published a
slender book about the most interesting presidential candidacy since 1980.
Shelby Steele's characteristically subtle argument is ultimately
unconvincing because he fundamentally misreads Barack Obama. Nevertheless,
so fecund is Steele's mind, he illuminates the racial landscape that Obama
might transform.
Ronald Reagan's 1980 candidacy fascinated because, as a conviction
politician, he sharpened partisanships as a prelude to implementing
discontinuities in domestic and foreign policies. Obama's candidacy
fascinates because he represents radical autonomy: He has chosen his racial
identity, but chosen not to make it matter much.
In "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win,"
Steele, of Stanford's Hoover Institution, argues that Obama "embodies" --
an apposite word -- the idea that race can be "a negligible human
difference." His candidacy asks America to complete its maturation as a
society free from all "collective chauvinisms" about race. And his flair
for the presentational side of politics makes him, Steele concludes, immune
to affirmative action's stigma -- the suspicion that he is a mediocrity
lifted up by lowered standards.
Steele, like Obama, is a child of racially mixed parentage. But
Steele, 61, unlike Obama, 46, grew up when "race was a hard determinism."
For Obama, his race and how closely he will be tethered to it have been,
Steele surmises, choices that have made him a "bound man."
Son of an absent black father, Obama lived overseas, and in Hawaii,
remote from any large black community, and received an elite education --
all this, Steele believes, created an "identity vacuum" that caused Obama
to want to "resolve the ambiguity he was born into."
Since the 1960s, the prevailing dogma of black identity has, Steele
believes, required blacks to adopt a morally stunting stance of accusation
against white society. Whites eagerly embraced a transaction: Blacks insist
that their progress depends on whites' acknowledging through uplifting
actions their obligations of guilt to blacks; in exchange, whites get
absolution as their guilt is expunged.
Obama, however, is a product of America's mainstream, in which he
enjoys unlimited opportunities. He is a model of blacks' possibilities when
they are emancipated from ideologies of blackness, particularly those that,
Steele says, "focus on self-respect apart from achievement."
In his autobiography, Obama recounts how, when he was living in
Indonesia, his mother rose at 4:30 a.m. to work with him on a curriculum
more rigorous than the one at his local school so that he would keep pace
with American children. To Steele, Obama's upbringing illustrates the
primacy of parenting and self-reliance in black progress. Obama's success
refutes the theory of social determinism popular with many black leaders.
It is the idea that blacks are comprehensively and systematically held back
by an oppression that is prevalent even -- perhaps especially -- when not
apparent.
Since the 1960s, to "be black" has, Steele says, required blacks to
embrace "a deterministic explanation of black difficulty," a determinism
that "automatically blames and obligates white power for black problems."
It is, Steele charges, condescending of Obama not to use himself, and
especially "his exposure from infancy on to mainstream culture," as "a
measure of black possibility."
This, says Steele, could be Obama's "Promethean fire, his special gift
to his times." But "thus far, Obama is the very opposite of a Reaganlike
conviction politician." This is because Obama has chosen to resolve his
ambiguous racial identity by embracing the social determinism and identity
politics of post-'60s black dogmas. Hence he is a "bound man." He is "bound
against himself" because he "has fit himself into the world by often taking
his experience out of account."
Steele has brilliantly dissected the intellectual perversities that
present blacks as dependent victims, reduced to trading on their moral
blackmail of whites who are eager to be blackmailed in exchange for
absolution. But Steele radically misreads Obama, missing his emancipation
from those perversities. Obama seems to understand America's race fatigue,
the unbearable boredom occasioned by today's stale politics generally, and
especially by the perfunctory theatrics of race.
So far, Obama is the Fred Astaire of politics -- graceful and elegant,
with a surface so pleasing to the eye that it seems mistaken, even greedy,
to demand depth. No one, however, would have given Astaire control of
nuclear weapons, so attention must be paid to Obama's political as well as
aesthetic qualities.
Steele notes that Obama "seems to have little talent for anger." But
that is because Obama has opted out of the transaction Steele vigorously
deplores. The political implications of this transcendence of confining
categories are many, profound and encouraging.