Shelby Steele’s 1991 book The Content of Our Character
I did read Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
In January, Peter Robinson interviewed Steele on A Bound Man over at NRO TV’s Uncommon Knowledge. TUCC is discussed in the third part in the five parter, but the whole thing is interesting. Steele pretty much predicted how things have played out and says the same thing that I said here: that Obama's biracial-ness coupled with parental abandonment has wrecked havoc on how he sees himself and how he projects himself to others. Basically, Steele explains why there’s very little ‘there’ there. An excerpt of that third part is needed to illustrate Steele's point, I think; a transcription of it is forthcoming.
UPDATE: Here are the most perceptive observations of the interview's third part.
SHELBY STEELE: He was abandoned by his African father at the age of two. So in one stroke he lost both a father and a racial identity. So here in this all white household is this little kid who is being held accountable in the world as a black—being raised by a mother who’s white, a grandmother who’s white [and] a grandfather who is white; almost no experience whatsoever with other blacks.
And so, as I talk about in the book, as there’s a longing to know the father in Barack Obama there’s also a longing to know himself as a black; to feel that he belongs, that simple sense that other blacks take for granted, where it’s not a question at all.
For him, it’s a life-long angst. And so he’s driven in that direction and ends up on the Southside of Chicago doing community organizing when he could have gone straight ahead to law school and so forth [after earning an undergrad from Columbia]. [SNIP]
PETER ROBINSON: In any event, from Columbia he could have gone to Wall Street if he wanted to.
SS: He could have gone…and did for a brief moment. And quite, can’t take it. Wants to…this call, it’s there. This need. And so he takes this job at…below minimum wage as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago.
PR: As we have this conversation and as I read A Bound Man, I’m evaluating this man as a candidate. There’s a fascinating story, merely as a matter of character study and what it says about the state of race in the United States; but he’s running for president. So this notion of seeking out a black identity—the way it struck me was understandable and even commendable. Does it strike you the same way? Or is it still too much race? He’s doing something because of race? How do you understand it? How do you evaluate it?
SS: I went through something of it myself. Again [I’m] from that kind of a background. [Steele's father is black and his mother is white. --Ed.] I was lucky [that] I had my father. So…and I grew up in segregation and that will give you a clear sense of identity. (laughs)
PR: He was raised in a white world.
SS: Yeah.
PR: But you were raised in a black world.
SS: An entirely black world.
PR: Alright.
SS: So I didn’t feel the pressure, I don’t think, in the way that he did. But it was there. I’m aware of it. There’s a vulnerability that you have that people can see. As Christopher Hitchens says there, “why is he really black?” So somebody who doesn’t know you can walk up and say, “well you’re not really who you seem to be.” And always along with that goes this suggestion that you’re a phony; that you’re a bit of a fraud because of your birthright…your fate.
So it’s a vulnerability and there’s this desire to resolve it. And that’s, I think, Obama’s compulsion really: to establish himself as an authentic black [and] failing all along.
PR: You write: He goes to the Illinois state legislature, he’s now a member of the United States Senate for the last couple of years. He affiliates himself with a specifically black church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ. You write about it at some length. So, incidentally, does Christopher Hitchens.
Quote--Christopher now: “Run by the sort of minister that the press often guardedly describes as ‘flamboyant,’ this bizarre outfit the church describes itself as” now he’s quoting from their website, “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian and speaks of a Chosen People whose nature we are allow to assume is afrocentric.” Operative sentence: “Nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a sub-standard and shade-oriented place.”
Now there’s a point there. This is a graduate of Columbia and of Harvard Law School who’s going to a place that it’s reasonable to suppose that, in one way or another, is intellectually beneath him. Right?
SS: Absolutely.
PR: So how…do we cut him slack because he needs this? How do you understand that one?
SS: That’s one of the questions that I think the press…he’s been in this what I call ‘White Guilt Bubble’ where they never ask him anything meaningful.
How is it that you go to an afrocentric, Black Nationalist church, where everything is black—morality, "black"; community, "black"; family values, "black"; a church that your mother would not be comfortable in, if she would be welcome at all—how do you reconcile…
Could you stand up in this church and say, “It wasn’t 'blackness' that created Barack Obama. It was the 'midwestern' values of my mother. That’s how it got done. So maybe the people in this church might spend a little more time talking about those values than about 'blackness.'” I don’t think that Obama is likely to do that. But, how does he resolve it? How does he reconcile? [SNIP]
SS: When you are born as he was, you endure this abandonment and [it] leaves these wounds. And there is going to be—for anybody—an attempt to sort of fill up that void in some way or another.
The only way you can do it is through a thousand little self-betrayals; where you go to that church and you turn a blind eye to the fact that it’s beneath you intellectually, that it subscribes to an ideology that would exclude the loving family that you had. You betray yourself. You get used to self-betrayal as a survival mechanism, as a way of getting through the world, getting through society. And that’s where you pay the price, because when you’re doing that, you’re not developing a self. You’re not individuating.
And there clearly is some of that with Obama—this habit of self-betrayal.
For the first time, I feel a great deal of pity for Obama, along with empathy, of course since I grew up in a kind of a "mirror universe" in relation to his own. (I can't decide which one contains the bearded Spock.)
Be that as it may, Obama's background wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't seem as though his particular brand of neuroses played out in nearly every relationship that he has--personal and professional. His campaign is the very model of two-facedness and the absence of self which Steele points to. Obama isn't crazy but something more frightening--a vessel to be filled.
What kind of damage could such a president do?
"he’s been in this what I call ‘White Guilt Bubble’"....
I believe that Obama's first reaction to the Wright brouhaha - saying that he didn't think his church was all that controversial - was 100% sincere. He's spent his life in either elite-liberal-land (private school, Columbia, Harvard, U. of Chicago, Democratic fund-raising) or the ghetto. Neither of these are places where anyone would dare to call "bullshit" on the likes of a Wright.
Whatever his advisers may have told him, this last week is Obama's first direct experience with the fact that to a lot of the electorate, saying that the US government created the AIDS virus to kill black people is not a slightly eccentric view that you hear pretty often, it's unfamiliar, hateful lunacy.
Now he's apologizing for "whatever was offensive" the same way I apologize to my wife for "whatever it was that hurt your feelings." In my case the contrition is as sincere as my bafflement as to what exactly it was I did wrong. Charitably assuming the same applies to Obama, at the very least he doesn't have the cultural understanding of that majority of white people who don't work at a university or have an advanced degree that he'd need to be an effective president.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | March 17, 2008 at 01:29 PM
Be that as it may, Obama's background wouldn't be such a big deal if it didn't seem as though his particular brand of neuroses played out in nearly every relationship that he has--personal and professional. His campaign is the very model of two-facedness and the absence of self which Steele points to. Obama isn't crazy but something more frightening--a vessel to be filled.
What kind of damage could such a president do?
You could replace the "Obama" with
"Kerry" and the above would fit just as well. Leftist politics seems to attract malignant narcissists.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | March 17, 2008 at 01:32 PM
Just wow. Do you want to know why? Because every black academic I know has said precisely the exact same things about Shelby Steele himself. That Steele, whose twin brother Claude Steele the author of 'Stereotype Threat' theory, was the child of the interracial marriage that rejected the black side for the white side. So what's fascinating is how these twin brothers are loved or hated depending upon whether you are basically on the 'liberal' or 'conservative' (or 'white' or 'black') side of the identity issue.
Shelby fights in one direction and Claude fights in the other.
Nevertheless, Obama is too black for many and not properly black enough for himself. What an extraordinary dilemma.
Posted by: | March 17, 2008 at 03:15 PM
The last comment is on point and one I was going to make.
I still suspect that most of what Shelby Steele wrote about Obama, is really a self reflection gone public about Shelby Steele.
It's interesting how twins, Claude and Shelby, come at it from different sides and it is very interesting how Claude is ignored.
Posted by: DarkStar | March 17, 2008 at 06:08 PM
I too come from that sort of background. I can empathsize with Obama and even get the sense that I could have a beer and shoot the breeze with him, but that's where it ends.
In addition to the point that Steele raises concerning the abandonment by Obama Sr, he was raised by a nutroot mom. Void of faith (atheist) and nurtured by a loathing of the homeland, Jr had nothing to hold on to as he grew up-- kein wunder.
Even immigrants who abandon their homeland for new lands tend to cherish the best of their old ways as an "continuity" anchor to their soul. In my case. as a bi-racial & bi-national with multi-cultural upbringing on 3 continents, I'm unabashedly glad that I know who & what I am.
If one wants to call me black, that's their call and I may or may not respond. If one wants to call me white, that's their call and I may or may not respond. If one wants to know what to call me, call me an American, but white or black is NOT who I am.
I think that while doing as the Romans do when in Rome is a great asset, one has to ground him-/herself in a primary identity, with all others secondary. The Biblical warning that one cannot serve two masters applies, yet having multiple "identities" can be usefully leveraged, to whit, Apostle Paul's Jewish upbringing/Roman citizenship, but above all, a slave for Christ. Unfortunately, ungrounded Obama was beguiled by the rapability of a false teacher.
As to how dangerous Obama can be? Very.
cHillary is a known entity and her ways are set. For that matter, so is McVain. On the other hand, while Obama may think he has found himself thru TUCC, it is indeed ephemeral and a trial by fire will reveal that. Imagine Obama being a POW? Yeah. Right.
In the meantime, he is, as noted, an open vessel, waiting to be filled by whatever good-sounding ideas comes his way.
And if filled by someone as poisonous as Pastor Wrong; why... reparations under his admin sounds good, and G_ddamn the cost and G_ddamn the non-blacks whose family lineage had absolutely nothing to do with slavery, he's gonna do it. Stack some other languishing redistribution projects on top of the donks' FY09 hoped-for spending and now America is looking at a doubled or even tripled tax burden. And that's just on the financial side.
It also explains why he thinks that if he could just sit with tinpots, reason would prevail. Simply put, Obama has never truly understood that evil does exist, let alone come face to face with it. Agitating against evil corporations is just mindless ivory tower babbling.
So what's Obama to do about who/what he is? Given his late age, it's pretty much too late.
A tour of duty in the military could have developed his character.
A real job, like working at Walmart in between classes would have been eye-opening.
A private sector job after college could have disabused him of the notion of corporations=evil.
Invoking the mantra, "yes we can" are just words. Change for the sake of change is not good, more so when implementd willy-nilly. Mastering academic theory adds to knowledge, not wisdom. Wisdom is the zen of watching and learning. But when both are combined into good judgment, then yes, Obama can change America for the better.
About the only logical option for closing this gap left to Obama is to pack his family up and go to a 3rd world country and spend a few years helping some folks who really could use it. His vaunted community work in Chicago is next to meaningless, when America's poor live better than Europe's lower-middle class.
Living and serving in Africa would knock Obama off his arrogant horse. For starters, he would soon take back his asinine & patronizing reply to a Kenyan relative that wanted to go to America. And finally teach him the meaning of life and what oppression really means.
Can you imagine if Obama did just that right after his term as Senator and returned from Kenya in 2015 to prepare for 2016? Just the media attention would put a constant spotlight on Kenya and should have a calming effect for the good.
Of course, all of the above are predicated on a sincere desire to humbly serve above all and the rest wwould follow. To date, Obama has had it assbackwards.
BTW, Baldilocks, I like Steele's media appearances and articles, but haven't read his books. I'll have to pick up a copy of "Bound" to take with me when I go to SWA shortly.
Posted by: AH·C | March 17, 2008 at 06:23 PM
Darkstar and Anon: I had no idea about Steele's brother.
AH-C: Normally I frown on the long comments, but yours was very illuminating. Bound was a short quick read, so bring additional reading.
About your trip, be well and safe. Godspeed.
Posted by: baldilocks | March 17, 2008 at 08:14 PM
AH-C comments, from my POV, is a bunch of crap.
As if working with the 'disadvantaged' in Chicago aint' good enough?
And I *KNOW* you wouldn't want to live life poor as the people in Chicago, Baltimore, D.C, or New York.
I find it interesting that people who want to compare European poor to American poor, in other situations, say Europe living standards compared to U.S. standards doesn't matter.
Baldi, I'll contact you on Wednesday.
Posted by: DarkStar | March 18, 2008 at 12:12 AM
Sorry, Baldi, AH-C is right, by the world's standards, there are virtually no poor in America. A little travel in Latin America taught me the real meaning of "poor". That's not to say we don't have hellholes. The "poor" is this country tend towards obesity, a problem the true poor of the world would want. Good posts today, thanks.
Posted by: bzedman | March 18, 2008 at 06:47 AM
People who go into politics in seeking an identity scare the crap out of me. I'll take the usual - those seeking wealth and power - any day. They will will sometimes rest when their lusts are temporarily sated, but a hole in the soul can never be filled by politics.
Posted by: Ralph Phelan | March 18, 2008 at 06:53 AM
DS, I don't have the link to the story and fotos about Obambi's grandmother and relatives. The mud house, no running water, no TV etc standard of living is comparable perhaps to what 21st Century Americans?
And for him to tell a cousin to forget the dream of maybe moving to America demonstrates 2 things; a lack of appreciation for how good he has it in his million dollar home,
-where he doesn't have to worry about malaria,
-where he doesn't have to worry about et cetera, et cetera
-where he does have to worry about gangstas
-where he does have to worry about unionized teachers.... Secondly, it echoes Pastor Wrong's "G_ddamn America", even tho Obambi never "heard" him say it in church.
I too, would never recommend a friend or relative go visit or live in an accursed place. OTH, if Obambi is all about positive change, Kenya's millions could really use it more than America needs him.
From my POV, I grew up with a set of parents that dedicated their entire career to working with disadvantaged, if not the most disadvantaged in Africa. They did it not for fame or recognition but for love. As a result, when we did furlough here in the States, we were so "poor" we qualified for food stamps & cheeze, because every spare penny was channeled back to Africa.
If they were looking for fame and glory, it would have been so easy for dad to simply prove his thesis, come back home and pull 6 figures since the 70s.
And that's my implied gotcha for Obambi. The risk is that if he took his family to Kenya to affect change, he might never come back.
Baldi's beginning to frown so I better stop now. ;)
Baldi, I do apologize for the long thread. Keeping it pithy isn't my strong suit. As much as I tried, I struggled to contain the flow once I got fired up. Thanks anyway.
Posted by: AH·C | March 18, 2008 at 02:33 PM
PS. Lest anyone interpret "[t]he risk is that if he took his family to Kenya to affect change, he might never come back" as nefarious, it's not.
If he did it out of love and compassion, he could wind up seeing this work as his calling and voluntary chose to stay. He could become the "Mother Teresa" of Kenya, working to change the politics of tribalism and boost all disadvantaged above their circumstances.
Speaking of working with the disadvantaged community of Chicago, just what has he accomplished in terms of concrete gains? Crickets chirping, bank account swelling.
I dunno, but a million dollar earmark for the hospital where Michelle works sound like a quid pro quo in exchange for a $200K boost in her annual salary with interest. But that's the Chicagop machine for ya.
Posted by: AH·C | March 18, 2008 at 02:43 PM
DS, I don't have the link to the story and fotos about Obambi's grandmother and relatives. The mud house, no running water, no TV etc standard of living is comparable perhaps to what 21st Century Americans?
I'll write it again, there are people who say when the left compares the U.S. to Europe, they say the U.S. is not Europe so comparisons don't matter. Now you want it to matter in this case.
Again I'll ask, would YOU want to live in poverty in D.C., Baltimore, Chicago or any "inner city"?
Next, 10 years ago, a Virginia NAACP chapter sued the state over infrastructure that did not exist in a Virginia town. Then then GOP governor, after seeing the situation, said the NAACP was correct to file the suit AND was ashamed such circumstances existed in Virginia. The situation? Raw sewage going down the side of the unpaved roads. Homes with gaps in the side of the houses.
I'll ask again, would you want to live in such circumstances?
Posted by: DarkStar | March 18, 2008 at 08:21 PM
DS
1) No, I would not want to be poor here or there, I do not want to be poor anywhere. But if I had to chose, then I would rather be poor here. That's why people the world over give up anything to come here and not the other way - because AMERICA is better than any other!
2) You brought up comparing America's poor to Europe's poor. Your example of raw sewage is no comparison to the squalor of Old Europe's poorest. On top of that, I asked, compared to what 21st Century American. I didn't ask for 20th Century examples, because I know we are constantly improving.
3) I compared America's poor to Europe's lower-middle class. On average, the US has more square footage for living spaces, more electronics, more bling, lower PPP and higher per capital income. Our poverty line is close to their PCI. And besides, Jesus said we will always have the poor with us.
3) My point in even talking about the poor was Obambi's pouring water on a relative's desire to move to America, telling him that it ain't no better. Talk about eyes to see and still blind to America.
4) For all his efforts, just what has he concretely done to raise Chicago's poor up? Banning Walmart from city limits only forced Chicago's poor to drive their rust buckets further in search of variety and value.
5) For a fighter, he's done more harm than good. For the privilege of cutting off their noses in spite, Chicago loses a tax base and reaped higher carbon emissions as a bonus. Fighting off school choice was a real victory -- for the unions. Fighting to expand abortion rights was really noble, never mind the vile offense to his "beloved" Jesus - if Pastor Wrong's mother had aborted him, Obambi would really be lost, eh. And the list goes on.
Bottomline, Obambi is a rotten & dangerous Marxist who would rather destroy all that is good, just so he can dictate what is "good" for us. All his work with the poor was merely a literal stepping stone to fetching power - just words, nothing else.
Come to think of it, he ain't even a real African-American in the colloquial sense. He has no natural claim to the indignity of American style slavery. His blackness was transplanted here nearly 100 years after the abolishment of slavery. If, and big if, we ever start handing out reparations, he has no claim to even 1 red cent.
Posted by: AH·C | March 18, 2008 at 10:17 PM
DS, I stand corrected, I found out that the poor are still living in pitiful slums, if not tents, down in New Orleans. My Bad
Posted by: AH·C | March 19, 2008 at 10:10 AM