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March 18, 2008
The Obama Bargain By Shelby Steele ~ Excellent Article!
The Obama Bargain
By SHELBY STEELE
March 18, 2008
Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.
But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.
The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.
How to turn one's blackness to advantage?
The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.
This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.
His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.
Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America's tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America's redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?
Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.
And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.
But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.
No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win"
Posted by Wild Thing at March 18, 2008 02:44 PM
Comments
Its a moronic article. Shelby Steele is that version of black intellectual that decides to make money by writing and speaking criticism of his fellow blacks written to cater to the ideas of white audiences.
Real black intellectuals engage with their own community. What Shelby does, in my opinion is to spend his talents to spin narratives of criticism about black people that play to white people. Whether his primary motive is self hatred, a desire to be accepted by whites, perhaps his own insecurity as very light skinned black man, or just plain greed, I don't know. I think when you read his work, you should really say to yourself, Shelby Steele is talking about himself, not Obama.
That this man is absurd is immediately apparent. The Obama campaign and Obama the candidate are no different than Al Sharpton?!!! You must be joking. Sharpton could not be elected to dogcatcher. Black people did not vote for Sharpton when he ran for president. Stupid statements like that immediately demonstrate that Shelby Steele has no perspective and no balance. For crying out loud, this guy has written a whole book about how Obama is trapped by his race and in my view, that guy is talking about himself, not Obama. His analysis is a joke.
Posted by: Aaron at March 18, 2008 04:58 PM
Aaron, I allowed your comment so I could respond to you. I checked out your blog that you put with your posted by name and you are all excited about Obama. This is America and you certainly can be for anyone you like.
Just as I can be against the person you think is the saviour for America.
It is always interesting when blacks can't stand other blacks if they are NOT liberal lefties like you and Obama are. Good men like Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas, Larry Elder, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson and so many others being called names, saying they are not true blacks etc. LOL
Shelby Steele wrote an awesome article. Too bad you cannot see the truth. sigh
Posted by: Wild Thing at March 18, 2008 05:31 PM
Well Aaron what great qualifications does B.Husseing Obama have, that qualifies him for the job of President of the United States.
Name one notable accomplishment, name one Bill he sponsored that is notable and signed into law.
Obama is a racist and hate monger just like his mentor and 'Spiritual Advisor' Jerimiah HALF-WRIGHT'.
He has been convinced that he is downtrodden and beat upon. Obama offers nothing but he will take money away from me and my neighbors and give to poor black and brown people , FIRST, THEN and only then will the 'Whitey' be considered.
If anyone else did that it would be called robbery. Obama is nothing more than a high class thief and a LIAR. Unfortunately, Half-Wright, stole Obama's mask and now he has to own up to the LIES he told to three major networks last friday.
His vision is Marxism, pure and simple, he does not love this country, he hates the United States. During his speech today he must have been very uncomfortable with all the American Flags in the back ground. He doesn't even have the decency to stand at attention, or put his hand over his heart during the playing of the National anthem.
To me the man, this little man is nothing more than a moral and spiritual coward, trying to climb to the highest position on the backs of good hard working White people, who he will later throw under the bus.
Support who you will, but be forwarned you know not what you are asking for.
Posted by: Mark at March 18, 2008 10:24 PM
