Whether voters buy into Mr. Obama’s analysis and take up his invitation to move on may become apparent in the coming primaries in places like Pennsylvania. It remains to be seen whether he has nudged whites and African-Americans any closer to mutual understanding or simply stoked the anxieties and suspicions that helped close down the conversation before. Shelby Steele, a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win,” called the speech “shallow, beautifully delivered and just disingenuous” — coming from Mr. Obama “who has been blessed with every manner of opportunity in this society.” Mr. Wright’s anger is demagoguery, said Mr. Steele, who like Mr. Obama is biracial. Racism “no longer remotely accounts for the difficulties in black America,” Mr. Steele said. As for the lack of discourse about race, it is a product of political correctness, “the language of white guilt.”
Asked what is needed to break the stalemate, he said, “White bravery.”
What Politicians Say When They Talk About Race
By JANNY SCOTT
Americans and their political leaders have been tongue-tied on the subject of race. We were reminded of that last week when Senator Barack Obama, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, took the almost unimaginable step of going before a national audience at a precarious juncture in a close campaign and speaking explicitly about what race means to blacks and whites. He spoke of black anger and white resentment and the significance of race in American history; his purpose was political but he spoke with seriousness and gravity and at length. Whether the speech helped or hurt him remains to be seen. But the moment was unlike virtually any in the more than 40 years since the triumphs of the civil rights struggle tore up party alignments of the past and tamped down explicit discussion of race by presidents and major-party candidates addressing the American people.
The dynamic had been different once — when African-Americans had begun to vote Democratic as well as Republican and presidential candidates of both parties competed for their votes; in 1948, Harry Truman, courting swing voters in a close election, became the first presidential candidate from a major party to campaign in Harlem (and ordered an end to segregation in the armed services right after he won the Democratic nomination). In the early 1960s, opinion polls found that a majority of Americans saw civil rights as the dominant issue facing the country. And President Lyndon B. Johnson, in one of several memorable 1965 speeches on race, said, speaking before a joint session of Congress after the “Bloody Sunday” voting-rights march from Selma, Ala.: “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
Yet it was President Johnson, too, who foresaw the end of what Glenda Gilmore, a Yale historian and author of “Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950,”Richard Nixon and later Ronald Reagan. With blacks voting overwhelmingly Democratic by now, and their party struggling to hold onto white working-class ethnic voters in the North, there was little incentive for presidential candidates of either party to bring up race in a serious way. described last week as a 20-year “national conversation on race” in the 1950s and 1960s. After signing the Civil Rights Act in July 1964, the president is said to have observed that he had just handed over the South to the Republicans for at least a generation. The Republicans seized the opportunity to peel off Democratic states. They studied the campaigns of George Wallace, the Alabama governor who ran as an independent presidential candidate in 1968, to see how he appealed to whites. They developed the “Southern strategy” that helped
Politicians were not alone in dropping the issue. The Watts riots broke out within days of the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the Vietnam War increasingly supplanted civil rights in the public’s attention.
“Our morale was busted by the war,” said Richard N. Goodwin, the former Johnson speechwriter who wrote the ’65 race speeches. “The moral energy you needed was not there anymore.”
Middle-class whites who had supported civil rights in the Jim Crow South pulled back when the struggle moved North. They decided it was time to move on. That decision coincided with the rise of some of the thornier issues in civil rights — poverty, economic justice, black identity, the Black Power movement, Professor Gilmore said. Whites were alarmed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by urban violence; they had grievances about busing, affirmative action and other social programs. Talking about race became increasingly loaded. When word of an internal government report on the condition of the black family, written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the speech on race that President Johnson had delivered at Howard University and using the word “pathology,” leaked to the press in 1965, a furor ensued, sabotaging a planned conference on future government policy to help blacks. Mr. Moynihan was accused of being racist, although not by black leaders like Roy Wilkins and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Race did not disappear entirely from presidential campaigns; it went under cover. It lay buried in code phrases like “crime in the streets,” “states’ rights,” and “welfare mothers.” Michael Klarman, a professor at the University of Virginia Law School who specializes in the constitutional history of race, said, “Nixon talks about ‘law and order,’ which is a code term for the urban race riots and rising crime rates. He talks about appointing strict conservatives to the Supreme Court, which is a code term for justices who won’t insist on mandatory busing. And he talks explicitly about how we ought to have ‘local control of schools.’ Without explicitly using the language of race, he is saying whites shouldn’t have to go to school with blacks.”
In 1980, Ronald Reagan, campaigning on a platform that included “states’ rights,” opened his general election campaign in Philadelphia, Miss. — a decision criticized because it was where three civil rights workers had been murdered in 1964.
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Br. Shelby Steele
When I read this article two days ago I couldn't figure out what Br. Shelby's remarks had to do with the substance of Obama's speech. After rereading the article this morning, I am still not any closer to an answer. What does come across to me, however, is a tremendous amount of barely concealed anger on Br. Shelby's part toward Obama and by implication toward black Americans.
Janny Scott writes that Br. Shelby and Obama are biracial as though each occupies and shares a common racial endowment that Br. Shelby is uniquely qualified to assess and pass judgment on. The problem is that Obama does not use his blackness as a "victim" or "blackmailer" as Br. Shelby apparently enjoys implying over and over again. Br. Shelby, on the other hand, continually uses his whiteness to judge and condemn Obama and, again by implication, all black Americans.
I believe Shelby's anger is
I believe Shelby's anger is at Black folks, and by implication Barack Obama. His father was a militant sort and took Shelby as a child to meetings where, in essence, he heard all these Black men talking shit about his mamma.
He's been working out his psychological issues publicly.
Interesting suggestion! I
Interesting suggestion! I had forgotten about this aspect of Br. Shelby's life. I try to avoid publicly psychoanalyzing anyone but in Br. Shelby's case it is difficult not to do so because he so obviously enjoys baring his soul even in 800 word op-ed pieces. I wonder if black folks are the only ones who see how much Br. Shelby engages in projection. He continually accuses black folks, for example, of seething with anger when he himself is a cauldron of thinly concealed rage. Raging at black people under the guise of giving them a healthy dose of reality is a time honored tradition in America. Look at how well it has paid off for a former English teacher at San Jose State.
I had forgotten about this
I would never have known of it, except a guy I used to talk to a lot from the old Afroam mailing list said we should really be curious about what made Claude Steele the guy that identified and named stereotype threat, which has been scientifically supported over and over, while Shelby, growing up in the same house, can only identify and name niggers.
He didn't quite put it that way...
I swear, if Obama becomes President, one of Shelby's eyeballs will start to grow as he uts on weight.
Glenn Loury's Break With Shelby Steele
Glenn Loury's Break With Shelby Steele
Loury's break with the right became final in the fall of 1996 during the battle over the California Civil Rights Initiative, also known as Proposition 209. Aggressively promoted by Ward Connerly, a black conservative member of the University of California's Board of Regents, Proposition 209 sought to eliminate race- and sex-based preferences in state contracting, hiring and college admissions. The Center for New Black Leadership wanted Loury, the group's chairman, to publicly endorse the referendum, the culmination of the right's efforts to ban affirmative action. Loury expressed tepid support for 209 but refused to lobby on behalf of it.
''We're the Center for New Black Leadership, and we will be leading no black people if we make this our issue,'' he told his associates. But the board disagreed, and Loury resigned.
A few days later, Steele phoned him. ''Where do you stand on race?'' Loury says Steele asked him. ''It's as if you're a racial loyalist here. I thought we all agreed.''
''No, Shelby and I didn't agree,'' Loury says now. ''I was always aware that, whatever I thought about race, I'm still black. Shelby's position. . . . '' Loury starts to laugh. ''I was about to say, Shelby's position was that we had to completely transcend race, though I can imagine saying those words, too. But my heart wasn't in them, whereas he really meant it. How could it have been otherwise? His mother was a white woman. His wife is a white woman. When he looked at his own children's racial identity and wondered about an oppressive world that would say to those children, 'Choose sides' -- a dilemma I'd never faced -- Shelby's angle of vision was really quite different from my own. So in all honesty, it was I who betrayed him, not he who betrayed me.'' The two men have not spoken since that conversation. (Steele declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Writing in The New Republic on the eve of the referendum's passage, Loury declared that it was ''flawed both in letter and spirit,'' and went on to excoriate ''colorblind absolutists'' and to argue that ''some 'discrimination' against whites'' may well be ''the inevitable -- and defensible -- consequence of measures to identify and limit discrimination against blacks.''
''There came a point when I couldn't look my own people in the face,'' Loury says, explaining his evolution. ''Everyone else had a place to go. Some would go to Jerusalem. Others would go to Dublin. You see the metaphor. Where would I go? I came back to Chicago and talked to my uncle about what I was doing. There was a reproachful look in his eyes, a sadness. He said to me, 'We could only send one, and we sent you, and I don't see us in anything you do.' Eventually I realized I couldn't live like that.''
P6, you were the one who said it first
And I believe you were correct. Steele is going insane - literally. He looks at Obama, sees that Obama has made all OPPOSITE choices from himself,and is this successful. It's as if Obama's success is some personal rejection of the life Steele has lived. That's the root of it to me.
pt, you dropped some deep stuff about Loury.
Also P6
And P6, how interesting could it be...that's been Steele's whole purpose - to validate a certain White perspective by putting a Blackface on it. Steele has wanted to give in his Black card for years, yet is stuck in the bind that the only reason he gets PAID is because he has the Black Card and is willing to pimp it for certain folks. This, too, is what drives him slowly insane.
The next time I'm in the Bay
The next time I'm in the Bay Area I'm willing to drive down to Stanford and pick up Br. Shelby's black card.
We could have a card burning ceremony right there in the quad and reduce his card to a pile of ashes. I can bring a boombox and play a recording of Mississipppi John Hurt singing Lay My Burden Down.
Freudian analysis
I never knew that Claude is Shelby's brother until this post. I've read Claude's articles and the first time that I heard of stereotype threat was in his contibution to Lani Guinier's Who's Qualified? With all the psychodrama I need to to know if it's true that the Steele brothers are estranged from each other. Years ago I heard that Shelby had a twin brother that he doesn't speak to.
Claude and Shelby
I saw them walking together along with their wives at the San Francisco Book Fair around 1992 or so. I don't know anything about their relationship but they were laughing and talking on that occasion.