Discriminations

At the risk of premature speculation, it appears that two still somewhat hazy but nevertheless distinctive views of Barack Obama are beginning to emerge. In one view he is a typical, traditional liberal Democrat, distinctive only in his inexperience, his bi-racial heritage, and his effective use of rhetoric promising “hope” and “change,” “a new direction,” etc. This view emphasizes his usually conventional Democratic policy positions and notes that he has called for speaking unpopular truths more often than he has actually spoken unpopular truths.

The second view might be called a version of hopeful identity politics. It believes that the most important thing about Obama is not what he believes or what he says or what policies he proposed but simply what he is, a bi-racial person whose very persona holds out the promise of racial reconciliation. I have discussed intelligent presentations of that view by Stuart Taylor and Edward Blum here, here, and here. In an eloquent statement of this view that I did not discuss, George Will argues that “Obama Transcends Racial Confinements.” Will is impressed by but ultimately rejects the argument of Shelby Steele’s new book.

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.
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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....

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.”

Will likes the analysis but rejects the conclusion.

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.

This is a very optimistic reading of Obama. Although I would like it to be accurate, especially if Obama wins, I have expressed some skepticism about the degree of Obama’s “emancipation” from the “perversities” of racial preference politics. (See here, here, here, here, and here.)

The hopeful optimism of Stuart Taylor, Edward Blum, George Will and others that Obama can lead the country to a new plateau of racial reconciliation must rest, at least at this point, on a conviction that the bi-racialism that Obama literally “embodies,” that what he is, will ultimately be more important than whatever he may believe, say, or even do.

They may be right. If he wins I certainly hope they’re right. But at this point their confidence that what Obama is will trump his long support for racial preference policies leaves me with a troubling, Clintonian observation: it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.