Regarding the article “Obama’s post-racial promise” by Shelby Steele (a self-described Black Conservative) that appeared in the Los Angeles Times as an Op-Ed piece on Nov. 5, 2008, I have the following remarks:

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STEELE: Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.

RA: This is a rather omniscient declaration. Exactly how does Steele know such a thing? Answer: He doesn’t.

In order for Steele to make this accusation he would have to: a) be able to read into Obama’s heart to check his motivations; or b) have some document wherein Obama and/or his campaign people stated something like: “And here’s where we can seduce whites with a vision of their racial innocence in order to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.”

I read the article and I see no reference to any such document. And I know that Steele can’t read minds/hearts. (Only God can read into a person’s mind/heart.) So, his accusation here is really worth a whole lot of nothing.

Moreover, it’s decidedly offensive for him to suggest that the white people who voted for Obama did so not because of any agreement they may have felt with his perspectives, plans, or promises—but because of some magickal spell he had placed over their guilt-ridden consciences that caused them to see nothing but his black skin. And in an effort to demonstrate a lack of racism in them, they voted for him—i.e., the Black man. That is not only an arrogant claim to make by Steele, but one of the most baseless observations of the election that I have yet heard.

STEELE: Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long—that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America?

RA: This is one of the most loaded and meaningless series of rhetorical questions ever asked in a legitimate newspaper article. It was a waste of time to write, and a waste of time to read.

Obviously, the answer to all of these questions is “no.” And if Steele were paying any attention at all to anything or anyone besides himself, he would see that no one is saying otherwise. In fact, during Obama’s victory speech, the President-Elect made it all very clear to those who had an ear to hear:

The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term. But, America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you, we as a people will get there. There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won’t agree with every decision or policy I make as president. And we know the government can’t solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And, above all, I will ask you to join in the work of remaking this nation, the only way it’s been done in America for 221 years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

Was Steele listening? I doubt it. And this remark was made on CNN: “I went and looked back at the Constitution, and the first sentence talks of our desire to form ‘a more perfect union.’ We haven’t done that, but we’re still striving” (Gloria Borger, contributing editor and columnist for US News and World Report and a Senior Political Analyst at CNN, Nov. 4, 2008, CNN News Election Coverage). Was Steele listening? Apparently not.

STEELE: And shouldn’t those of us—white and black—who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

RA: The answer to this one is YES, while it is apparently NO to Steele. But in my opinion, if someone can’t “take pride” in what has happened, then something is very wrong with them on a number of levels.

STEELE: His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America—and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

RA: I’m not sure what planet Steele has been living on for the last year or so. Obama projected ideals that touched on hope for: 1) a better economy, 2) national health care, and 3) an end to foreign wars.

Not once did Obama directly or indirectly make any statements (or give any hints) that his candidacy was about race (or that a vote for him would be a vote against racism). He did not speak as a racial candidate, but simply as a candidate who happened to be a candidate of color. He, in fact, seemed to go out of his way to avoid tainting his campaign by playing the race card.

Obama also did not tie HIS vision of America to some pie-in-the-sky vision of a post-racial America, nor did he equate HIS vision with “political decency.” Obama equated his vision of America with a better America for everyone because of policy changes he would make—and that’s the same thing every presidential candidate projects.

STEELE: Obama’s special charisma—since his famous 2004 convention speech—always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas.

RA: Here we have yet another example of Steel’s penchant for making arrogant, self-centered, revelatory proclamations based on nothing but his own inner knowledge; knowledge that is grounded externally in nothing.

Has Steele done a survey of every American who voted for Obama to determine if they were motivated by his “political ideas” as opposed to the so-called “racial idealism” he embodied?

Does Steele really think that the DNC could have thrown just any old Black man up there, pinned a “racial idealism” pin on him, and succeeded in winning the election?

It’s ridiculous. What Obama had to say about the state of our country obviously resonated with Americans. And what his skin color has shown is how Americans have reached a place where they can now actually vote for political ideas—NO MATTER WHO IS STATING THOSE IDEAS, INCLUDING AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN.

It’s hard to believe how anyone, especially Steele, could miss the obvious.

STEELE: This worked politically for Obama because it tapped into a deep longing in American life—the longing on the part of whites to escape the stigma of racism.

RA: How insulting can Steele get? Now Steele is speaking for most, if not all, Whites in general!! Unbelievable. Steele must think he is God if he thinks he knows what my “deep longing” is—indeed, what the “deep longing” is of all Whites across this country.

And the last time I looked at the election map, it seems that there were a whole lot of Whites in the South who apparently felt no “deep longing” at all to vote for Obama. Just about every Confederate state remained red in this election. That pretty much destroys Steele’s whole theory.

If anyone should have come out in droves to vote for Obama as a way of cleansing their conscience and fulfilling their “deep longing,” it would have been racists in Southern states. And that didn’t happen.

STEELE: In running for the presidency—and presenting himself to a majority white nation—Obama knew intuitively that he was dealing with a stigmatized people. He knew whites were stigmatized as being prejudiced, and that they hated this situation and literally longed for ways to disprove the stigma.

RA: Again, we have end on end comments that suggest Steele is living in a world of his own making and simply inventing his scenario as he goes along. (And he’s reading Obama’s mind again).

STEELE: Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer. Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo. . . . It is exactly because America has made such dramatic racial progress that whites today chafe so under the racist stigma. So I don’t think whites really want change from Obama as much as they want documentation of change that has already occurred. They want him in the White House first of all as evidence, certification and recognition.

RA: Here we have Steele once more playing a psychologist, complete with pad and paper in hand, as the entire White population of America sits on his couch for analysis. At this point, the article has become comical in its subjectivity. What Steele has done is essentially accuse White voters of not voting their political principles, beliefs, ideals, and choices. According to Steele, they’ve merely voted for a Black man to ease their consciences and prove to the world they’re really not racists.

This is an insult to all Whites who voted for Obama. And it belies and unwillingness on the part of Steele to view this historic moment in perspective.

STEELE: The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer’s ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.

RA: This is really the only thing Steele is saying in his verbose article. Basically, it’s this:

“Hey, all you of stupid White people who voted for Obama! Listen up! Don’t you know that the only reason you voted for him was because you wanted to make sure everyone knows you’re not racist! All of you old people wanted to just show you’ve put racism behind you. All of you young people wanted to show you were never racist to begin with. But none of you really voted for Obama because you thought he had a good platform, or because you believed he’d make steady/reliable president, or because you liked his economic/health plans, or because wanted to end our foreign wars. NO! You actually just voted for him because he’s Black!”

IMHO, Steele is the the one who needs to take a look at what’s going on inside his head — not the Whites who voted for Obama.

STEELE: There is nothing to suggest that Obama will lead America into true post-racialism. . . . The torture of racial conflict in America periodically spits up a new faith that idealism can help us “overcome” — America’s favorite racial word. If we can just have the right inspiration, a heroic role model, a symbolism of hope, a new sense of possibility. It is an American cultural habit to endure our racial tensions by periodically alighting on little islands of fresh hope and idealism. But true reform, like the civil rights victories of the ’60s, never happens until people become exhausted with their suffering. Then they don’t care who the president is.

RA: Steele is putting far too much racial-equality expectations into the minds of people who are rejoicing over Obama being elected. He is building a political, social, cultural, psychological strawman to knock down. No one that I’ve heard commenting about Obama and the significance of this election is looking to him as THE ONE who’s going to end racism in America once and for all. Again, that’s absurd.

Obama, truth be told, is not supposed to lead “America into true post-racialism.” The fact that he has been elected indicates we are already in the beginning stages of a post-racial America, thanks to the unseen grassroots efforts of ALL Americans, which began with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

Steele’s entire article is based on his own fantasy about why Obama won. Some people, I suppose, are just poor losers. Moreover, it’s my opinion that what’s motivating Steele has a lot more to do with embarrassment than anything else, since his last book A BOUND MAN has the subtitle, Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.

I guess Steele got it wrong and now has to somehow clean up his mistaken prediction—not to mention what it’s going to take to do some major re-writes to the next printing of that volume in order to not look foolish. It’s not surprising that a recent review of the book noted: “A lot has transpired since Shelby Steele wrote A BOUND MAN—so much so that it’s not clear whether the book is even relevant anymore.”

Steele, quite simply, seems to have been caught with his intellectual pants down and is now scrambling to pull them up. And to do that, he keeps repeating his arguments from the past, with a new post-election spin that justifies his previous sentiments in a book containing a prediction now proven to have been erroneous.

I quote, once more, Gloria Borger (contributing editor and columnist for US News and World Report and a Senior Political Analyst at CNN, Nov. 4, 2008, CNN News Election Coverage) I think only the least gracious among us—no matter what your political philosophy—only the least gracious wouldn’t say that this is a watershed moment for America.”

I think we know one person now who would easily qualify as being one of “the least gracious” among us—Shelby Steele. And, tbh, his lack of graciousness might be for some rather odd reasons. He seems to have a chip of sorts on his shoulders—i.e., he’s the son of a black father and a white mother, who wants to make sure no African-American gets any help or recognition of any kind from the white man that might in any way suggest that the black person didn’t make it all on their own. Otherwise, the victory/accomplishment is hollow.

Not surprisingly, he opposes Affirmative Action, which he actually views as another kind of racism against blacks—i.e., as a mandated way of insuring equality that is not earned because it discourages self-agency and personal responsibility. This plays into Steele’s foundational notion that all whites see blacks as victims, which is counter-productive to true racial reconciliation. He hates the victimization card, which might be why he finds rejoicing over the election an African-American like Obama so repugnant.

Because Steele doesn’t find Obama agreeable on a political level, he instantly assumes that others couldn’t possibly feel, with any legitimacy, any other way. So the only conclusion is the basic thrust of his L.A. Times article—i.e., If white people voted for him, then they MUST have voted for him only because he’s black. Hence, there is no justifiable reason to actually celebrate his win. It was just Whites clearing their consciences.

The truth is that plenty of white people voted for Obama and it had nothing to do with him being black, or them trying to prove to the world their lack of prejudice.

Richard Abanes
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