Steele Yourself

Way back in the latter middle part (or early late part) of the last century, when under the influence of the developing civil rights movement liberal impulses were just beginning to stir formerly somnolent Stanford, where I was then an undergraduate, an older, activist graduate student for the first time decided to run for student body president. His campaign slogan: “Elect A Man To Do A Boy’s Job!”

I was reminded of that campaign and that slogan by Shelby Steele’s typically excellent column in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem, whose implicit theme is that we’ve elected a boy (and a particularly callow one at that) to do a man’s (or woman’s) job. (If Steele were writing this blog post, in anticipation of the supercilious criticism sure to come from oh so emancipated Southerners like David Gergen, he would probably inject a perceptive riff here on the risks of describing a black man as a boy and why he was doing it anyway. Please associate me with what Steele would have said.)

I have discussed Steele before. Over a year and a half ago, in Man of Steele, I wrote that

[j]udged by the power of his analysis in several books that are almost breathtaking in their perception, Shelby Steele really is an intellectual Superman.

I have also discussed his analysis, especially of Obama, here, here, here, and here. In his column today Steele reprises his signature argument of the racial bargain:

… Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer’s mask — winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not — not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

You will already have determined that I’m a big fan of Steele’s; I think his analysis is always perceptive, and often brilliant. But it is not infallible, as evidenced by the title of his recent book, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. Moreover, I believe his column today includes a serious misreading of Obama, on two counts.

First, in his bargain with whites, what Obama sought from them was not that his race not be held against him but rather that it should be regarded as a positive reason to support him. If his race weren’t such a dramatic positive, there would have been no cause for the tidal wave of of self-congratulation that engulfed the country because it elected its first black president.

Second, Steele’s main point in today’s column is that Obama is like the emperor whose new suit isn’t really there, or, in a different metaphor, that in many respects Obama himself is an empty suit.

America’s primary race problem today is our new “sophistication” around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods (“diversity”) and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama’s election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there — all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If “hope and change” was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him….

Here Steele is describing what can only be viewed as a massive national case of willful deception, and self-deception, an indictment that has much more scathing and devastating bite than his previous references to a simple racial bargain. “I think,” Steele writes,

that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness — not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

…. [H]e has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as “ideological,” and by promising to deliver us from the “tired” culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be “post-ideological,” “post-racial” and “post-partisan,” which is to say that he defines himself by a series of “nots” — thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

Although he is almost always shrewd and perceptive, Steele here strikes me as having been taken in by Obama’s mask. Obama’s political success derived from persuading voters that he was as Steele describes him — post-racial, post-partisan, post-ideological, etc. But that presentation, it should now be clear, was entirely a pose.

If anything, Obama is closer to the opposite of Steele’s portrait — the most ideological, most partisan, and most race-conscious president in our history. Steele is right that “hope and change” were this emperor’s new clothes, and that a gullible public led by a politically correct media and eager to congratulate itself for electing a black was incapable of admitting that this suit did not exist. But Steele’s own misperception — regarding Obama as an empty suit, with no convictions, no rigidly ideological agenda, as offering nothing but “a politics out of emptiness” — confuses the mask with underlying face just as dramatically.