I was watching that Ralph Nader clip with Kenyatta yesterday, and telling her, I don't understand why people find it hard to say, "You know what I fucked up." I don't get the obsession--especially keen among public figures--with digging the ditch even deeper. And then this morning I saw Glenn Loury on bloggingheads doing the right thing.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
"I don't know the use of thinking for a living, if you're not exploring."
"For a living", that's the key right there, or as my very wise uncle put it, "You don't become conservative until you have something to conserve."
Give yourself a few years, Coates. One day you'll have a new take on things, and then hear yourself thinking, "Yeah, but where's the percentage in saying that?"
Note to travelers from other dimensions: In this section of the time-space continuum, Kareem Abdul Jabar and Muhammed Ali were sports stars, not presidents. So the argument that nothing helps you in the quest for the presidency like being a black man with a foreign-sounding name doesn't really hold up.
People would like to break a barrier. But for it to happen with an elected post (rather than an appointment) you need to combine hyper-competence with a post-barrier confidence. Obama managed it; eventually a woman will manage it for president, as many have for other elective offices. But the idea that black candidates are greatly aided by the racial motivations of white voters who can't wait to vote for them is rather lacking in anecdotal or statistical evidence.
'Seduced whites with visions of our racial innocence to coerced us into acting out of racial motivation?'
Finally! All my life I've been waiting to cry 'black racism' at black American's foremost intellectual. Apparently we've been seduced by, as one woman I phone-banked called him, 'that young buck.'
This bullshit about Obama's impact on racism continues to hurt my brain. I wrote a few rants about racism on your pre-Atlantic blog, and I'm looking righter and righter. (Screw that 'I was wrong' stuff.) Do any two people agree what the word even means?
A hefty chunk of whites think racism means having a current membership in the KKK. And we all know racism is something only bad people possess. So no, by those measures, we're not racist.
I mean, whites are pretty invested in our racial innocence in the first place. That's like trying to seduce Salma Hayek with visions of having a great body. And those of us who don't belive in our racial innocence were gonna vote for the Democrat even if he was white as, oh, John Kerry or Howard Dean or Al Gore.
Man. If whites stop telling me what Obama's election means to blacks and blacks stop telling me what 'white guilt' is all about, I'll be one happy racist white man.
I have to say, lately I find myself disagreeing with Glenn Loury far more frequently than I would expected. I thought his criticism of Obama and his praise of McCain was naïve or disingenuous at times, and I'm not sure I like what appears to be (but probably isn't) a full-throated endorsement of free markets that he sometimes mentions in passing. Yet he unquestionably is one of the most interesting Blogging Heads out there.
And I'm always glad when someone brings people back down from delirious revelry in wonderment and joy at Obama's election by reminding them that this is just one change—albeit a magnificent one—in a country that still has miles and miles to go before the dream is realized. Not to say that wonderment and joy are not appropriate these days, but we can't let ourselves get so carried away that we forget all the work left to be done.
Deleted. You're not even close to being on topic. If you want to discuss the impact of black immigrants. Please start blogging and forward me a link. Or go to the open thread.
A year ago, I told a friend that I didn't think Obama would win because I wasn't sure that he really was tough enough and that Hillary had many more levers of power over Obama.
Boy am I glad I was wrong.
You know, I'm such a sucker for the stories out there of the 100+ year old black men and women that got to vote for Obama. But even for my dad, a 65 year old white guy who went to the March on Washington in 1963, he was overcome by the contrast between the America he grew up in and the one that exists today.
Being an active and engaged citizen requires listening to people. We all need to do more of it, especially now.
It's a sign of the degradation of American discourse that hucksters like Shelby Steele are go-to guys for op-eds. There's nothing more indicative of the intellectual and moral failures of contemporary conservatism than seeing third-rate thinkers like Steele making a good living at a rightwing think-tank simply by virtue of their desperation for black faces who will trash affirmative action and do the hustle against liberals.
He cannot admit he was wrong. Not with a theory like "the bargainer." Steele suffers from the same sort of psychological paralysis as the post civil rights leaders who were initially suspicious of Obama. He will not accept or make note of generational changes. What I mean by is that Steele, at least through his writing, appears to be a man constantly trying to define himself in opposition to certain types of "blackness."
His insistence that whites are petrified of being labeled racists…well nobody wants to be labeled as a racist, especially if you still think the only forms of racism are expressed by burning crossing and nooses. Bill O’Reily has been called a racist, that hasn’t stopped him from getting a job. It didn’t stop Don Imus for getting another radio gig.
I actually think that essence of his article - that Obama succeeded by making a lot of people think his race wasn't a factor when it was (just not in the way we normally think of it) - is dead on right.
But I reject the notion that Obama's win was about some pure "he's just a man, not a black man" idea. Steele is right that even that thought process has a racial dimension.
Where I quibble with Steele is that he is talking about racialism, but seems intent on equating it with racism. By equating those two terms, he locks all Americans into a cycle whereby we cannot "overcome." I think also, ironically, he actually advocates for the very post-racialness he thinks Obama didn't actually achieve.
I think the problem most folks have with talking about the impact of Obama is that we don't know what that impact is. I think that we are also not honest about the reality that a lot of whites do see him as a way to alleviate their guilt. I think it's foolhardy to act as if white guilt doesn't exist.
But I'm largely with you in the sense that I'm more interested in how Obama will affect the psyche of young black kids. In that sense, Dyson's piece yesterday addresses that in a much better way than Steele's does.
Well, as a white person that supported Obama, I would concede that there is some truth to Shelby Steele's argument that some percent of white people were excited to vote for Obama because his election would "prove" that the United States had moved past racism.
Steel has long been relegated to the underside of history's dustbin; his crowded space is shared by few, and the inhabitants do not have room for others. For thirty plus years Loury has been levitating above this dustbin. Simply said, just let them be!!!!!
Think of Obama's words on the 106 year old voter in Atlanta; these sentiments eviscerate the basic arguments of Steele and Loury. In sum their is not much to be said about either.
When Steele writes stuff like this, he's just Limbaugh with a tan and more complex sentences: "(Obama) has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be, means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness."
This is ridiculously hackish stuff. The funniest thing about Steele's book on Obama is how easy it would be to write a screed psychologizing Steele, the political culture he's inserted himself into and serves and the "bargains" he's made along his peculiar path. Any fool can write the kind of crap ruminations he churns out.
Voting for Obama to prove that we've moved past racism is like voting for John Glenn to prove that we've moved past gravity.
Rawr, rawr, no one can understand you he-dinosaur.
Seriously, Shelby Steele is a relic of 1990 discourse. And he's not even close to the foremost black intellectual, now or then. Cornel West would absolutely obliterate him, now or then. Steele still thinks white kids want to wear Africa medallions because Ed Lover and Dr. Dre do on Saturday mornings. His analysis STILL has no consideration of Latinos and Asians-- STILL! He's cooped up in Hoover Institute like the right-wing's own Venus Hottentot, and his thought has suffered severe stagnation from the isolation.
He's sad. To quote the NAACP's own Dan Quayle, how terrible it is to lose one's mind.
It seems to me that Shelby Steele has gotten completely wrapped up in the idea that what made him successful was his "contrarian" nature. If he doesn't stand up and do the opposite of the rest of the pundits then people stop listening.
This is the same guy who wrote "A Dream Deferred" -- the same guy who said that victimization was part and parcel of the problem. That viewing yourself as a victim instead of an agent of your own destiny would lead to failure.
He said, blacks must stop "buying into this zero-sum game" of victimization by adopting a "culture of excellence and achievement."
Now excuse me if I'm wrong, but how does Barack Obama not represent exactly what he was striving for in the black community in "A Dream Deferred."?
He also seems to have an issue with the multi-racial component of Obama's identity in his latest book. That because Obama had to strive to be "black"; Obama can't possibly avoid falling into the trap of liberalism and victimization. Race is destiny was the subtext of that book. Instead of Barack Obama being in control of his own destiny, Obama is tied to the establishment because of he wants so bad to be "black."
Now maybe in this article he's just trying to shout above the elated chorus, and dash it down with a bit of targeted cynicism. After all cynicism seems to be the single recurrent element in all his work.
Incidentally, insofar as Steele seems to be making some cogent point, it's just trading on the kind of shit that parallels sophomoric philosophy discussions: "Even if you're 'ignoring' something it means you're conscious of it, right ?" "Doesn't altruism make people feel good about themselves?' Etc. Etc. Who fucking cares ? These aren't burning issues. A sense of irony goes a long way and there are plenty of ironies about the Obama candidacy to fuel discussion for a long time. Steel isn't an ironist. He's a masturbator. Truly useless man in the world he woke up to on November 5th. Hopefully outfits like the LA Times will figure that out and he can be relegated to National Review and Weekly Standard where he belongs beside towering thinkers like Jonah Goldberg. Oh wait a minute - the LA Times publishes that idiot as well. Maybe there's a reason they're struggling to stay alive...
I have not read Steele's Obama book.
But I've watched several interviews in his press tour and I gotta say: if Steele kills himself one day it will surprise me not at all. Because if he didn't hate himself before, after Obama's victory, he must for damn sure.
It is a repudiation of not just Republican policies, but of how Steele has led his entire get-along life.
As for the book, is it just me or is the shorter Steele, "There are two kinds of Negroes: house Negroes and field Negroes."?
'Cuz damn, that's about 1 inch deep.
It seems that he takes a lot of words to basically tell you what any marginalized brother nipping from a bottle in a paper bag could have told you in the 60's.
And after being proven wrong--a black man that talks about being black, that has a black wife, that will tell white folks they are wrong sometimes, CAN get the support of white folks, he's STILL talking shit.
Steele directly compares himself to Obama. And every time I hear him explain why Obama can't, essentially, be a complete man, while knowing that Obama has managed to be exactly that, I fear that Steele might hurt himself.
(Well, I don't exactly "fear" it.)
Ta-Nehisi, I really enjoyed your article in The Nation. Especially this little bon mot:
Christened "America's foremost black intellectual" by George Will--an unsurpassed authority in these matters
Bwa-hahahaha!
"black America's foremost intellectual."
Ahhh, an intellectual. Maybe that's Steele's problem.
I think when you're too busy being "intellectual" you can lose your poetry. This can also happen to people who make too much money (just ask Billy Joel). Without poetry, it's impossible to speak truth. Intelligence can't get there alone. So dare I say I would hate to become an "intellectual".
Well, his piece reads like a rationalization of his own thesis, nothing more. The problem with thinking you can get into everybody's heads is that people vary so much more in their experiences and motives than it would appear on the surface.
I take issue with his statement about leaders following, too. it's true that visionaries begin movements, so leaders follow in that sense, but leaders lead the masses, who don't necessarily think for themselves and actually need a leader. Just look at Bush to see how leadership is real and can be squandered to a truly evil degree.
Whenever i see Dave Chappelle's Black White Supremacists skit I think of Steele.
The word for the whole right-wing movement is: unconscionable. For them, right is what they can get away with. I'm not even sure intellectual honesty applies here because they are not really thinking it through at all.
I think of Loury as being on the other end of the spectrum: Overthinking it.
I don't know of anyone who takes Steele seriously, except
a) newspaper editors, and
b) a guy who used to attend my church, until he descended into a really sad spiral of paranoia and started E-mailing rants about how everyone (other than himself and Shelby Steele) was a bunch of PC hippie liberals motivated by white guilt, and if they would only realize this about themselves and shape up, then we could make the world a better place.
It's the latter part that cracks me up - I can't figure out if Steele wants all those poor deluded souls to just disappear, or if he imagines them reading his bullshit and going "Oh, I've been so wrong! I was just a white guy trying to be cool - and Obama is a big loser - and I will no longer support any of the things I supported. Instead, I will... do something else."
Admittedly, most analyses of why right-wingers do the things they do are not really geared toward giving them insight about themselves, either... but at least if you say the right wing is fooling rural voters by playing on their racial and economic fears, you can imagine a positive alternative. And the right wing really is doing that, and they have to because they don't have anything to offer. For Steele to just ignore every positive reason why someone might support Obama, and say it's all just false consciousness, goes beyond obtuseness into pure wingnuttitude.
Still scratching my head over Steele's last sentence, that all he wants is a "competent President". And that led him to pull the lever for McCain/Palin??
It's true that Obama's policy precriptions don't explain his popularity. But they were sound positions, well articulated. Any white Democrat with his positions, temperament, intelligence, knowledge and eloquence would have won the election and the admiration of the electorate. Obama's race obviously added an important dimension to the race, its meaning etc. But he did not seduce my white vote. I would have given it freely and enthusiastically to any white candidate with Obama's attributes.
While Steele’s article as a whole is indeed laughable, I do think part of his analysis about the significance to some whites about being non-racist is on the right track. He’s surely wrong about Obama intentionally appealing to this sentiment. But Obama was a candidate who made it possible for whites to not feel guilty about complicity in racism, and I think that was an indeed part of his appeal for some of those so-called independents and moderates who might otherwise have voted for McCain. (As we all know, this voter group was not central to Obama’s success, but they did play a small role.) And it wasn’t just because Obama was a blank screen – he definitely played a more active role than that. Remember the father’s day sermon? For some white voters, that message was registered as “See? I’ve always known I wasn’t the real reason blacks don’t succeed in this country - Obama knows it too!” Of course that wasn’t Obama’s message, but the point I’m trying to extract from Steele’s meandering is that Obama gave some whites enough room to turn him into the black man who gave them a pass, and let them hang on to their sense of internal righteousness.
For me, this appeal links up with a small pet thesis I’ve got that conservatives generally are more inclined toward external blaming while liberals are more inclined toward internal blaming. I think if liberalism is going to have a shot at maintaining the fragile majority support in America it seems to currently have, we liberals are going to have to take this blaming issue seriously, because I suspect the external blamers truly do outnumber the internal blamers. Have any of you listened recently to some of Jimmy Carter’s speeches made while he was president? Holy mackerel, talk about an internal blamer. And while I listen to those speeches and think, “What a thoughtful, honest, sincere person!”, clearly many more people listened and though, “What a mope!”. I think Obama believes that it will be possible to make some liberal changes in America while tolerating external blaming impulses. I’m curious to see if he’s right.
"I think when you're too busy being "intellectual" you can lose your poetry. This can also happen to people who make too much money (just ask Billy Joel)."
Billy Joel always sucked. Other than that... I don't see what's so terrible about Steele's op-ed, other than that it's empirically wrong. Obama won because of high black turnout, a huge share of the Hispanic vote and youth vote, what a bad president Bush was, what a poor candidate McCain was - not because he seduced us whites into thinking we could enter a post-racial world if we voted for him.
I'm a white guy who voted for Obama in the primaries and in the general. I did this for two main reasons:
1. I'm sick of the "culture war" the seems to basically be more Boomer narcissim masquerading as some kind of political debate. I was born in 1970, not 1950. Can we move on, please?
2. I was sick of the Clintons. I mean, God bless 'em for all they've done, but they were only promising more of the same in terms of a "defensive crouch" type of politics and their personal soap opera.
Obama was someone who represented a break with both. This isn't to say race was something the I was never aware of or that it didn't matter. It did, but only up to a small point. If he'd come across like a hack politician instead of a thoughtful and talented one, I'd have voted for someone else. It ain't rocket science, Mr. Steele.
I actually don't know one white person who voted for obama because it lightened the burden of historic guilt or heralded some sort of post-racial world. I will admit that his non-hectoring approach to race allowed him to get his foot in the door, but that was about it. The rest he did with the content of his character. Steele really does seem stuck in a time warp.
Asher -- "Obama won because of high black turnout, a huge share of the Hispanic vote and youth vote, what a bad president Bush was, what a poor candidate McCain was - not because he seduced us whites into thinking we could enter a post-racial world if we voted for him."
It's your unconscious white guilt that made you say that!
Psych! Just kidding, Ash.
Look, it used to be rather prevalent on the left to boil down complex formulae into one grand theory. But Steele takes the cake. Does my wife go to a Black doctor because of some need to assuage racial guilt, or does she go to her because she was recommended by a friend AND she was in the insurance network? Steele would say guilt . . . and ascribe all White people's use of Black professionals as some sort of self-ablution; conversely, those Black succeed because they are "bargainers". Uh-huh . . . . Why couldn't it just be that, in the end, some White people thought Obama was the better candidate, just as Donovan McNabb is still the starting QB for the Iggles (much to Limbaugh's chagrin) because McNabb is simply a good QB?
Evets is right, too. Steele is stuck in the same 1970s timewarp that envelopes Jesse Jackson, Sharpton, and the entire friggin GOP. None of them grasp that America MAY HAVE just grown up. All that interracial dating in college, listening to each other's music, doing rock-paper-scissors for the last slice of pizza with high school friends of another race . . . all of that has just warped our minds to such an extent that we just don't know what the f*ck people like Steele are talking about, because their stilted 1970s reality and their 1960s lens is out of focus here in the 00s.
I mean, the fact is that Obama didn't win because of how he did among white voters. If not for his performance among other races, if he got the same black vote and Hispanic vote that Kerry got, he wouldn't have won. So I think that any explanation of why he won that tells some story about how he appealed to whites doesn't make much sense.
Um....isn't that the very definition of "hack"?
Shelby Steele is somewhere having a nervous breakdown. It should be complete by now, considering that it's been slowly happening since Obama announced for the Presidency. Steele doesn't understand. Obama made all the OPPOSITE choices Steele and his ilk did, and he's PRESIDENT-ELECT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
That's a total mindfuck for Steele and his ilk.
I was disappointed with Shelby's latest column. But it's a little ironic though - I recall near the end of an interview with Bill Moyers, he claimed that he was tired of talking about race and politics. I'm not sure about that. His last book was about race, politics, and naturally Obama. He obviously relishes this topic.
Moreover, I'm simply not sure what the problem is with America getting a 2-for-1 special on Jan 20th-a change from the disastrous policies of Bush's administration, and a feel-good moment for the history books (which will, at least slightly, help race relations). I dunno, maybe Shelby's just disappointed that a black conservative didn't get there first (if there ever was a black conservative lawmaker in the GOP... uhoh).
I understand Shelby's sadness with the black community though, with so many people with potential not following through, going to university, etc. We'll do better. I know I am.
One other thing-does anybody else other than me wonder what him and his brother Claude talk about over there at Standford? FASCINATING!!
Shelby Steele is a complete and total tool. He's got some bullsh#t two-side schema to force black guys into, whose primary purpose seems to be getting some attention for Shelby Steele. I'm sick of his pseudo-intellectual shine-ola. Or, at least HE seems to think it's shine-ola.
I got news for Dr. Shelby Steele, Pee Aitch Dee. There's two kinds of people: thems that think there's two kinds of people, and them's that don't. Bind THIS, Steele!
Honestly, Steele Just. Has. Issues.
His writing is nothing more than exercises in projection; he is always criticizing others--both "liberal" whites and Blacks--for being "bound" by race when he himself is bound by it.
If Revs. Jackson and Sharpton are out of luck because of President-elect Obama, then surely Steele and those of his ilk are, too. They are nothing but one-trick ponies whose only ability is racial hucksterism--they know nothing else.
I pity him.