Adam
tackles Shelby Steele:
There was the time he said "Obama
can't win," based on a binary understanding of black identity, a petty
analysis he is still cribbing from even as the first black president is
rounding out his first six months in office. There was the day-after
election analysis that claimed white people flocked to Obama out of
white guilt or the promise of a racial utopia--a fortune cookie
argument that ignored any concrete demographic analysis of what happened to the electorate in 2008. Then there was the time he tried to convince
conservatives that their problems with race had nothing to do with the
Republican Party's shameful history of opposing black rights. But the
coup de grace, the saddest moment of Shelby Steele's career, had to be
the time George Will damned
him with what must have sounded to him like the faintest of praise, by
calling him America's "foremost black intellectual." After years of
condemning affirmative action, Steele found himself trapped in a
checked box of his own divising: Even those who think he is great think
so only in relation to his peers as defined by skin color.
I think claiming we were losing the Iraq War because of
"white guilt" belongs in there. That said I think Adam is being unsympathetic. He has no idea what it's like to write a polemic which predicts that Obama will lose, and still try to be a respectable writer in an era when Obama has done just that. Steele's answer is to repeatedly
roll out the failed tropes from a failed book:
I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support
without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without
playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.
This sentence, of course, makes no sense, given that Barack Obama just did exactly what Steele says he can't do. But I think if you read Steele's book (
I had to) you'll see that it makes sense as a kind of unintentional memoir. I deeply suspect that this "bound man" notion says a lot more about Steele, than it does about Obama.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
It's also a bit disingenuous because very few people knew he would win or believed he could (except maybe Obama himself). Always fun to watch white liberals pat themselves on the back after the fact.
Hmmm which white liberals do you speak of lad?
I am actually not sure what you are trying to say tigger. What is "also a bit disingenuous?" What "white liberals" do you mean? As for the claim that very few people believed that Obama could win that is obviously and quite demonstrably false. Obama won precisely because he was able to form a huge organization of people as well as politically important Democrats (Kennedy and Kerry are the first that come to mind but there were quite a few more) who absolutely believed he could win. You might be able to get away with the claim that a lot of the establishment thought that he wouldn't win, but the fact is that there were very few people who thought he couldn't win especially once the early polls of Iowa started coming in in the month before the caucus. After Iowa, it was pretty much a lock with anyone who was paying attention that not only could he win but that he would win.
Fair points all.
I guess my point was that sure the strategy they employed made sense, but I think it is actually a bit ridiculous to say that folks were sure that race wouldn't complicate his run and potentially be the thing that made him lose. Sure - they hoped that would be the case, but I think they ran the campaign the way they did to make sure that didn't happen. I don't think that translates automatically into knowing he'd win. Believing and knowing are really two very different things (though I am aware that sounds like splitting hairs).
Sometimes this stuff is talked about like everybody and they momma had been dying for a black candidate and everybody knew he'd win. I just don't believe that to be true. I also don't think that's something you can poll (for all the reasons polling on race is problematic).
Agree with Tigger in that a lot of people --including me-- were rooting for Obama but weren't that sure that he could win. As a matter of fact, that was the reason that Steele's book made me shit in my pans. Wasn't him such a prominent intellectual? And there he was telling us he couldn't win. I went with Obama anyway but I couldn't even bring myself to pick a copy of the book to see why he was saying that Big O couldn't win.
I don't think that translates automatically into knowing he'd win. Believing and knowing are really two very different things (though I am aware that sounds like splitting hairs).
Well I don't disagree with that and I don't think its splitting hairs at all. Its an important distinction. The entire point is that its one the Steele missed. He argued that Obama couldn't win, not that he believed he wouldn't. And he did so on the basis of an incredibly facile and entirely incorrect understanding about both the racial dynamics of the American electorate and Obama's message on race. I defy anyone to find any significant point on which Steele was correct in his treatise on Obama, even giving him something for not having our hindsight.
If your point is that it wasn't at all unusual to think an Obama victory was unlikely in say 2007, then I don't disagree. I was one of those people. But Steele went well beyond that and for a set of wrongheaded reasons that really ought to disqualify him from serious consideration on these matters forever and ever more.
I thought he could win. That is one of the reasons I donated my money and time for the first time in my life.
Is it amusing to watch me pat myself on the back after the fact? Am I being disingenuous?
Not disingenuous at all. First time I gave money & time since Carter. Same for a lot of folks. That's why we won.
Hey Tigger500, i have to call you on that! I told my friends at work in 2004 when i saw Obama speaking at the convention that he will become the first black president, they all laughed at me. My friends are Haitians, Jamaicans, Nigerians, Rwandans, and from all over the place. During the Democratic campaigns for the nomination of their candidates, i came back at them and told them that he will win the nomination, and they wanted to bet with me on it! And i did, made some serious dollars (canadians $), anyone with an objective eye could see that Obama is a superstar, and American and americans love superstars
Talent is talent, and creme always rise to the top.
Al Franken predicted Obama would be the next president as early as 2005.
You know Coates I read a little bit of the article and thought about sending it to you and then thought better of it. I thought about it and you know the way you said at one point that you weren't going to link to clips of cable chatter anymore because in some ways it legitimized and and in other ways it just wasn't helpful? That's the way I see Shelby Steele now. Most people, even in the black community I bet, don't know who the hell Shelby Steele is. For that matter, of the people President Obama could ever hope to win over I don't think any of them would take him seriously. I am willing to bet that Shelby Steele gets the majority of his notoriety at this point on the backs of the people who criticize him the most. It might be time to just ignore Mr Steele and let him drift away into total irrelevance.
Im just sayin.
You're right. There really isn't anything else to say.
I deeply suspect that this "bound man" notion says a lot more about Steele, than it does about Obama. Not trying to damn him by association, but he does work at the Hoover Institution. Coffee with Ed Meese, Condeleeza Rice, and George Schulz.
Not being a black male, I cannot understand the life Steele has lived. He does not seem, to me, to be fully of the 21st century. Bound more fully to the past than others who have achieved greater things.
Anecdote: at the inauguration, my wife was most struck not by words but by a 78-year-old minister from North Carolina she had happened to help earlier, both standing through a long morning. When he began to hear the words, he was overwhelmed. "I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it", he shook his head, crying (my wife exchanged e-mail addresses; a new wise friend -- isn't the internet great?). Completely understandable from a black man born in 1930 in the South. That pretty much sums up Shelby Steele for me. Feels like he can't believe it either and just doesn't know what to say.
I said it at TAPPED, and on my own blog in longer form, but I don't think the racialist stuff is really all that surprising. Steele has made a career of that, after all. What's really interesting is how obvious the untruths are, and how weak the writing is. It's like he doesn't have the heart for it anymore, and can't even fake it anymore.
Well let me add my two cents about Steele:
As someone who is deeply involved in the institution that he, too, is involved in (a university in Northern California), his brother's departure from our university will push Shelby Steele up to #4 (out of 5) on the list of the most important, inspiring, and loved Steele men on campus. The list once went:
1. Claude Steele
2. ________
3. ________
4._________
5. Shelby Steele
Now it reads:
1. The memories and love of and for Claude Steele (who is moving to Columbia to become Provost)
2. ________
3. ________
4. Shelby Steele
5. The placard that reads Claude Steele, Ph.D. (Currently fighting with #4)
For the life of me, I cannot understand how and why the Hoover Institution keeps this man around. Yes he is conservative, but there are conservatives out there who are so much more nuanced, thoughtful, and intellectual in their work. Bring McWhorter back. Bring Stanley Crouch, the Gangsta Rapper. Hell, make a life-sized cutout of Thomas Sowell (who is already here) and have Sowell and Sowell 2.0. But Shelby Steele is simply a disaster.
I apologize if my lists here were a bit petty and childish; but sometimes you just have to release. My bad, guys! Now back to our deliberative, thoughtful, liberal humanist discourse... what was that about tofu and hybrids? Hybrids now run on tofu? Hmm...........
thanks for the chuckle
Seconding muzz. And he's your disaster. You keep him.
Wouldn't America's Foremost Black Intellectual have to be someone that actually has the EAR OF BLACK AMERICA?
That actually talks TO Black America.
Shelby Steele is a Slave Catcher that has made his money TALKING ABOUT BLACK people TO WHITE people.
That's how he gets paid.
When's the last time he sprouted his claptrap in front of a predominantly Black audience?
Shelby hates all things Black, beginning with himself.
Shelby had a breakdown beginning with the announcement of the Obama candidacy and culminated in his election as President.
Shelby and his ilk can't take it:
They made all the choices OPPOSITE of Barack Obama..
and yet, HE was elected President of the United States.
It's enough to make a Slave Catcher go nuts.
He has no idea what it's like to write a polemic which predicts that Obama will lose, and still try to be a respectable writer in an era when Obama has done just that.
Done just what? Lost?
MikeS, thanks: much as I appreciate the discussion, I didn't understand that part of TNC's argument either.
W.E.B. DuBois is one of America's greatest intellectuals. Which illustrates just how damning is Will's faint praise.
Andrew Sullivan's reaction to Sotomayor, and the controversy surrounding her is a prime example of why he annoys me from time to time (also, he screwed up his link to you, and linked to Adam Serwer twice.)
Sullivan on Sotomayor's racial views:
.Victimology? Seriously? Sullivan thinks this woman has ever once in her life played a victim card?
Ever hear the comparisons between Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire? Astaire gets the fame, while Ginger had to do everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels. If there's a "oppressive consciousness of her identity - racial and gender" it's because race and gender issues constantly oppress her, and she overcomes them with grace and wit. Sotomayor is in the same intellectual weight class of any of the other SCOTUS members, and she had to get there backwards, in high heels, so to speak. But god help her if she talks about it, because that gets called a victim mindset.
Know what it really is, though? It's the ruling class of white men who've managed to create a dialog where anyone who questions the justice of the existing power structure has a "victim mindset". With the implication that you'd be better off just shutting up, never mentioning it, and soldiering on.
And Andrew Sullivan is playing his part in shutting down minority voices by perpetuating that meme. He's probably not even aware of it.