Steele Says Obama Can’t Win

Shelby Steele, the Hoover Inst.’s favorite house slave, has written a new book about Barack Obama’s racial “mask.” Hat tip: Bookerrising.

“Shelby Steele, the black conservative scholar at the Hoover Institution and best-selling author of The Content Of Our Character, has a new book out next week called A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama And Why He Can’t Win.

“Mr. Steele, who, Senator Barack Obama is the offspring of a white mother and black father, argues that the liberal Illinois Democrat’s quest for the U.S. presidency is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics. It is one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America.

“According to the book description on Simon & Schuster’s website, Mr. Steele argues that poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Sen. Obama’s presidential bid pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by America’s painful racial history — a morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence. Mr. Steele outlines how Sen. is caught between the two classic “mask” postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. The “mask” is designed to appease White America’s fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace what they view as a nonthreatening black person and vote for him.

TheStateOf . . . Steele and Obama. I (J) think most white people like Obama because he’s clearly smarter and more authentic than any of the other politicians out there. (He’s not perfect.) I really don’t get the sense that white people are supporting Obama out of some sort of racial guilt. By arguing this way, Steele is basically saying that a black man can never lead white people, which I consider a slavish way of thinking.