A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
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Poverty and inequality are typically the focus of dialogues that take place during presidential elections, but Obama’s bid for so high an office pushed 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 was 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, during the race, Obama was 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 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.
Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Stanford University, and is a contributing editor at Harper's magazine. His many prizes and honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, an Emmy Award, a Writers Guild Award, and the National Humanities Medal.
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Reviews for A Bound Man
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5So often we hear people discount an opinion because those offering it aren't a woman, are not the same race, or have not shared the same experience as those they are discussing. Well, as Shelby Steele opines about then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, no one can discredit his theories based upon not understanding his background on a personal level. Mr Steele goes to length to share in Obama's background, as a biracial son.This book is offers a window into the mindset of Barack Obama as man who cannot win pleasing both black and white Americans due to his genealogy. Political leaning does come into play, but it is not a main thrust behind Mr Steele's idea as to why potential President Obama is stuck between races.Delving into his past, not by any speculation but by the words he wrote to convey his past in Dreams from My Father, Shelby Steele deconstructs Barack Obama's dilemma and struggle to appeal to all voters without alienating himself from any contingent. The second part of the book is spent discussing the two styles of blacks; the Bargainers or Iconic Negro and the Challengers. Both "types" are represented in familiar faces and Mr Steele does a thorough job of explaining his rationale behind modern day race relations.I would say this book is only somewhat dated (as I read it near the end of President Obama's first term), it is interesting to read the anticipation of Barack Obama's run for the Oval Office, but also to reflect back on his campaign and see his effort in retrospect.
Book preview
A Bound Man - Shelby Steele
PART I
The Man
CHAPTER ONE
The High Possibility
The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossip’s wicked delight. Yet this piece of information was presented as vital, as one of those all-important facts about a person that, like the first cause of a complex truth, plays a role in everything that follows. Apparently, it is Barack Obama’s fate to have notice of his racial pedigree precede even the mention of his politics—as if the pedigree inevitably explains the politics. And I suspect that some people would feel a bit defrauded were they to hear his political ideas and only later learn that he was racially mixed.
Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until I was old enough to notice the world’s fascination—if not obsession—with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of thinking by race—dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside actual human experience. So I never know what people really want to know when they ask me what it is like to be—and here come the math words—biracial
or multiracial
or multicultural.
The self as the answer to an addition problem.
But, as best as I can surmise, what people really want to know is what it is like to have no race to go home to at night. We commonly think of race as a kind of home, a place where they have to take you in; and it seems the very stuff of alienation to live without solid footing in such a home. If this alienation is not nearly as dramatic as the old tragic mulatto
stories would suggest, it nevertheless does exist. How could it not in a society like America where race once meant the difference between slavery and freedom? Racist societies enforce the idea of race as home by making race an inescapable fate. So, still today, this fundamentally odd—even primitive—idea remains embedded in our democratic national culture, the legacy of our past. People who are the progeny of two races have a more ambiguous racial fate and, therefore, at least some feeling of homelessness. They stand just outside the reach of that automatic racial solidarity that those born of one race can take for granted.
So, people like Barack Obama and me are always under a degree of suspicion. The one drop
rule formulated in the days of slavery—one drop of black blood makes you black—consigns us to the black race (happily so for me and, I would imagine, for Obama as well), but the fact of an immediate white parent differentiates us and interrupts solidarity with blacks. And all this is worsened by the fact that whites are historically the oppressor
race. Thus, by the dumb logic of racial thinking, our very mother’s milk comes through a collaboration with the enemy. More literally, this collaboration
may mean that we enjoy more exposure to the dominant culture, more advantages in a color-conscious society. Mistrust and even resentment from other blacks often ensues. And from whites come the sneers one commonly hears in reference to Obama—he’s not even really black.
Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak. And both races can squeeze us in a blueslike double bind where the absurdity is as comic as it is tragic: we dismiss you for not being authentically black, yet we will never accept you as authentically black. Ha ha. When people can call you inauthentic and undermine your moral authority, they have a degree of power in relation to you. And where they have power, you have vulnerability.
This would have to be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama’s life (as it is in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One senses that his first book, Dreams from My Father, was meant in part to diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up
to his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly explores it. He practices that brave and aggressive self-disclosure that disarms by taking away the gossip’s ability to surprise. It is harder to deploy a man’s vulnerability against him when he publishes it in a book.
Still, I glimpsed some of the weariness he must feel at having this vulnerability regularly probed in a 60 Minutes interview that aired near the launching of his presidential campaign. It was the usual 60 Minutes setup, the camera in close enough for a dermatological exam. And there sat Obama, perfectly composed and seemingly ready for anything, the now famous ears framing his good looks in eternal boyishness. The correspondent, Steve Kroft, asked a series of predictable political questions and then, hunching forward a bit, entered the territory of identity. There was an allusion to the mixed-race background, and a question about how Obama saw himself. And here—probably because I knew so well what to look for—I saw the very faintest exasperation come into his eyes and then instantly vanish. Barack Obama has no doubt had a lifetime of rehearsals for this moment, and he must have had a hundred answers immediately at hand, all rehearsed to the point of glibness. Yet the answer he finally gave had real pathos precisely because it was so glib.
He was rooted,
he said, in the African-American community, but he was also more than that.
To be sure, this is the formulation of a man with a very complex identity trying, understandably, to make himself simpler and more recognizable to a society not used to pondering his like. Yet, this is also a formulation that reduces Obama’s identity to a banality. What could rooted
or more than that
mean? How would the two be simultaneously possible? And, for that matter, what could African-American community
really mean? A culture? A politics? To become recognizable, he processes himself through the same dumb racial math—he is one thing plus something else—that has been the very source of his vulnerability. He collaborates with the same tired racial conventions that made him an odd man out to begin with.
And yet a great part of Obama’s appeal in broader America—especially his political appeal—can be chalked up to his complex identity. He is interesting for not fitting into old racial conventions. Not only does he stand in stark contrast to a black leadership with which Americans of all races have grown exhausted—the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Julian Bond—he embodies something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism, innate to his pedigree, that automatically casts him as the perfect antidote to America’s corrosive racial politics. After all, this is the radicalism by which Martin Luther King put Americans in touch—if only briefly—with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of this idealism. And, as such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and racialism, to both segregation and identity politics—to any form of collective chauvinism. For all his misfittedness, he also embodies a great and noble human aspiration: to smother racial power in a democracy of individuals. To stand in the glow of so high an aspiration is to seem a bit enchanted or, at the very least, charismatic.
It doesn’t matter that he sometimes goes along with race-based policies, or that he made his own Faustian bargain with affirmative action (no college-bound black of his generation could avoid this self-compromise). No one is excited because Obama nods to identity politics; people are excited because he represents an idealism