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Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
Free Press
December 2007
On Sale: December 4, 2007
160 pages
ISBN: 1416559175
EAN: 9781416559177
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
In Shelby Steele's beautifully wrought and thoughtprovoking
new book, A Bound Man, the award-winning and
bestselling author of The Content of Our Character
attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for
the highest office in the land is fast becoming a
galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one
that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of
race relations in America. Says Steele, poverty and
inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but
Obama's bid for so high an office pushes the conversation to
a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and
innocence generated by our painful racial history -- a kind
of morality play between (and within) the races in which
innocence is power and guilt is impotence. Steele
writes of how Obama is caught between the two classic
postures that blacks have always used to make their way in
the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging.
Bargainers strike a "bargain" with white America in which
they say, I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in
your face if you will not hold my race against me.
Challengers do the opposite of bargainers. They charge
whites with inherent racism and then demand that they prove
themselves innocent by supporting black-friendly policies
like affirmative action and diversity. Steele maintains
that Senator Obama is too constrained by these elaborate
politics to find his own true political voice. Obama has the
temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial
family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the
exhausted racial politics that now prevail. And yet he is a
Promethean figure, a bound man. Says Steele, Americans
are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian that
we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think
about racial matters. Like Obama, most of us find it easier
to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk
knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Obama emerges as
a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to
accept and honor what we honestly feel about race. In A
Bound Man, Steele makes clear the precise constellation
of forces that bind Senator Obama, and proposes a way for
him to break these bonds and find his own voice.The courage
to trust in one's own careful judgment is the new racial
progress, the "way out" from the forces that now bind us
all.
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