Shelby Steele on Post-Racialism
The indispensable Shelby Steele calls Barack Obama on his contradictory “post-racial” rhetoric and his penchant to play identity politics. He once called Obama’s post-racialism delusional. “Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation,” Steele wrote. Chilling, but true.
In his latest piece for the Opinion Journal, Steele says the nomination of someone like “wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor was to be expected. Republicans have tried and failed to woo Hispanics, and Democrats understand all too well that they mustn’t take the Hispanic vote for granted. With Sotomayor, Obama scores a “first” and appeases an important racial block of voters.
And that’s precisely the problem.
“The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics,” Steele writes. “It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the ‘new,’ we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.”
I, too, have witnessed the contradiction. At one point I described Obama’s speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention as conservative-like, as he seemed to transcend race. But mostly everything he’s done or said so far has been racially tinged. Can we chalk it up to human nature?
Steele calls Obama’s post-racialism a mere impression, “a chimera that grows out of a very specific racial manipulation that I have called ‘bargaining.’ Here the minority makes a bargain with white society: I will not ‘guilt’ you with America’s centuries of racism if you will not hold my minority status against me. Whites love this bargain because it allows them to feel above America’s racist past and, therefore, immune to charges of racism.”
I’ve written on my personal blog that white liberals who thought they were looking beyond race when they voted for Obama actually were voting for him for that precise reason. As Steele notes, Obama “cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites.”
Is Catch-22 the best way to describe Obama’s dilemma?
Steele offers an astute distinction between Obama and hustlers like Jesse Jackson. The latter resorts to guilt-tripping whites into giving him what he wants, while the former “grants them innocence” before seeking what he wants. Obama has to appease minorities by playing identity politics on the one hand, and appease whites by pretending to be post-racial on the other. This quote sums up the essence of racial preferences, which in practice is nothing more than lowered standards:
Judge Sotomayor is the archetypal challenger. Challengers see the moral authority that comes from their group’s historic grievance as an entitlement to immediate parity with whites — whether or not their group has actually earned this parity through development. If their group is not yet competitive with whites, the moral authority that comes from their grievance should be allowed to compensate for what they lack in development. This creates a terrible corruption in which the group’s historic grievance is allowed to count as individual merit. And so a perverse incentive is created: Weakness and victimization are rewarded over development. Better to be a troublemaker than to pursue excellence.
Before I end up excerpted the entire insightful piece, read it for yourselves.
