WASHINGTON - America's foremost black intellectual has published a slender book about the most interesting presidential candidacy since 1980. Shelby Steele's characteristically subtle argument is ultimately unconvincing, though, because he fundamentally misreads Barack Obama.
Ronald Reagan's 1980 candidacy fascinated because, as a conviction politician, he sharpened partisanships as a prelude to implementing discontinuities in domestic and foreign policies. Obama's candidacy fascinates because he represents radical autonomy: He has chosen his racial identity, but chosen not to make it matter much.
In "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," Steele, of Stanford's Hoover Institution, argues that Obama "embodies" the idea that race can be "a negligible human difference." And his flair for the presentational side of politics makes him, Steele concludes, immune to affirmative action's stigma -- the suspicion that he is a mediocrity lifted up by lowered standards.
Steele, 61, unlike Obama, 46, grew up when "race was a hard determinism." For Obama, his race and how closely he will be tethered to it have been, Steele surmises, choices that have made him a "bound man."
Son of an absent father, Obama lived overseas, and in Hawaii, remote from any large black community, and received an elite education -- all this, Steele believes, created an "identity vacuum" that caused him to want to "resolve the ambiguity he was born into."
Since the 1960s, the prevailing dogma of black identity has, Steele believes, required blacks to adopt a morally stunting stance of accusation against white society. Whites eagerly embraced a transaction: Blacks insist that their progress depends on whites' acknowledging their obligations of guilt to blacks.
Obama, however, is a product of America's mainstream, in which he enjoys unlimited opportunities. He is a model of blacks' possibilities when they are emancipated from ideologies of blackness, particularly those that, Steele says, "focus on self-respect apart from achievement."
In his autobiography, Obama recounts how, when he was living in Indonesia, his mother rose at 4:30 a.m. to work with him on a curriculum more rigorous than the one at his local school so that he would keep pace with American children. To Steele, Obama's upbringing illustrates the primacy of parenting and self-reliance in black progress. Obama's success refutes the theory of social determinism popular with many black leaders. It is the idea that blacks are comprehensively and systematically held back by an oppression that is prevalent even -- perhaps especially -- when not apparent.
