Re: I Love "MY" Country

This is an interesting and thoughtful article. The author has the same
racial background as President-Elect Obama in that his father was
black and his mother was white. For the most part, I tend to agree
with it.......miki

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-steele5-2008nov05,0,6553798.story
From the Los Angeles Times
Opinion
Obama's post-racial promise
Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence
precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.
By Shelby Steele

November 5, 2008

For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has
elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural
meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate
power will likely become -- at least for a time -- a national
obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an
allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of
his victory as we are about its political significance.

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? 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?

Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it
seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these
possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black
president? And yet an element of Barack Obama's success was always his
use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle.
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.

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. In fact, this was his only true political
originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable.
His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned
Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all
this policy boilerplate was freshened up -- given an air of "change"
-- by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it
in.

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. 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.

Obama is what I have called a "bargainer" -- a black who says to
whites, "I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold
my race against me." 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.

Obama's post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most
wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism
to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black
advancement. Thus, whites became enchanted enough with Obama to become
his political base. It was Iowa -- 95% white -- that made him a
contender. Blacks came his way only after he won enough white voters
to be a plausible candidate.

Of course, it is true that white America has made great progress in
curbing racism over the last 40 years. I believe, for example, that
Colin Powell might well have been elected president in 1996 had he run
against a then rather weak Bill Clinton. 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.

But there is an inherent contradiction in all this. When whites --
especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his
post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary
motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. 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.

Certainly things other than bargaining account for Obama's victory. He
was a talented campaigner. He was reassuringly articulate on many
issues -- a quality that Americans now long for in a president. And,
in these last weeks, he was clearly pushed over the top by the
economic terrors that beset the nation. But it was the peculiar
cultural manipulation of racial bargaining that brought him to the
political dance. It inflated him as a candidate, and it may well
inflate him as a president.

There is nothing to suggest that Obama will lead America into true
post-racialism. His campaign style revealed a tweaker of the status
quo, not a revolutionary. Culturally and racially, he is likely to
leave America pretty much where he found her.

But what about black Americans? Won't an Obama presidency at last lead
us across a centuries-old gulf of alienation into the recognition that
America really is our country? Might this milestone not infuse black
America with a new American nationalism? And wouldn't this be
revolutionary in itself? Like most Americans, I would love to see an
Obama presidency nudge things in this direction. But the larger
reality is the profound disparity between black and white Americans
that will persist even under the glow of an Obama presidency. The
black illegitimacy rate remains at 70%. Blacks did worse on the SAT in
2000 than in 1990. Fifty-five percent of all federal prisoners are
black, though we are only 13% of the population. The academic
achievement gap between blacks and whites persists even for the black
middle class. All this disparity will continue to accuse blacks of
inferiority and whites of racism -- thus refueling our racial politics
-- despite the level of melanin in the president's skin.

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.

Presidents follow the culture; they don't lead it. I hope for a
competent president.

Shelby Steele is an author, columnist and senior fellow at Stanford
University's Hoover Institution.






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