Book Review - A Bound Man - Shelby Steele - I

In the wake of Pastor Jeremiah Wright's inflammatory sermons and Senator Obama electing to make a major speech on the topic of race, I read with great interest Shelby Steele's new book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Steele's thesis is that Obama is "bound" between two competing political needs. On the one hand, he must appeal to whites by symbolizing the promise of a new, more hopeful form of interracial relations. To that end, Obama offers an attractive alternative to the polarizing demeanor of men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton -- black leaders who ran for President primarily to promote racial agendas and never achieved significant appeal among whites.

Steele classifies Jackson and Sharpton as "challengers." Challengers operate on the assumption that "whites are incorrigibly racist until they do something to prove otherwise." Their power in mainstream society comes from being able to absolve whites (and institutions primarily led by whites) of the (presumed) guilt of racism. Challengers put whites in the position of having to earn racial innocence by supporting certain public policies and adhering to politically correct language and customs. In essence, they employ white guilt in one of three forms:

(1) "white people did x and therefore black people should have y";
(2) "white people are guilty of x and therefore they cannot say or do y"; or
(3) "white people bear ultimately responsibility for black uplift" (i.e. achievement gains).

By contrast, Steele classifies Senator Obama as a "bargainer." What bargainers do, says Steele, is offer whites immediate innocence and moral authority (which they naturally lack given the history of racism toward blacks) in return for goodwill and generosity. In Dreams from My Father, Obama recounts learning, as a teenager, that people were generally relieved "to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time." Obama often reminds audiences that he has a white mother and grandmother. He represents for whites a chance to move forward -- beyond the painful reminders with which Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton regularly confront them (which, says Steele, makes them uncomfortable and detracts from the coalescence of political alliances).

Steele maintains (and I agree) that Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background to guide America beyond the racial identity politics of the past. And yet -- Obama is "bound" by his need to "be black" in a racialist sense. This is the most fascinating part of the book, and I suspect the most controversial as well. I'll tackle this theme in part II of this review.