What Black Conservatives are saying about Obama

While the story about Obama's church has been in the blogs for many months now, its eruption into the mainstream and Obama's handling of the issue (almost as if he never expected to have to address it, that he, or his church's racism, would be given a pass) is proving to be revelatory. Revelations, the stuff of history, always stem from the unfolding of events, and not directly from the prior facts that help constitute events.

But it is not to Obama's supporters that we can yet look for much lucid comprehension of what has happened the last few days in America. They are yet far too involved in their desires for that. I have found the following among the more interesting comments I have read today.

Thomas Sowell:

You can't be with someone for 20 years, call him your mentor, and not know about his racist and anti-American views.

Neither Barack Obama nor his media spinmeisters can put this story behind him with some facile election year rhetoric. If Senator Obama wants to run with the rabbits and hunt with the hounds, then at least let the rabbits and the hounds know that.

The fact that Obama talks differently than Jeremiah Wright does not mean that his track record is different. Barack Obama's voting record in the Senate is perfectly consistent with the far left ideology and the grievance culture, just as his wife's statement that she was never proud of her country before is consistent with that ideology.

Senator Barack Obama's political success thus far has been a blow for equality. But equality has its down side.

Equality means that a black demagogue who has been exposed as a phony deserves exactly the same treatment as a white demagogue who has been exposed as a phony.

We don't need a President of the United States who got to the White House by talking one way, voting a very different way in the Senate, and who for 20 years followed a man whose words and deeds contradict Obama's carefully crafted election year image.

Shelby Steele:

Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.
[...]
Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

They're still offering Al Gore at 50-1.

Shelby Steele on White Guilt

Among my many backlogged projects is a desire to show readers something of Shelby Steele's recent important essay in the Globe and Mail. Unfortunately, the Globe only makes it available online if you pay. So, I'll quote from my print copy, with some comments interspersed for fair use (see also Margaret Wente's interview of Steele.

Quoting now from "The age of white guilt" by Shelby Steele (Globe and Mail, Oct. 25, 2007, A15):

In America, our racial history broadly defines the terms of our politics.

We may think of "liberal" and "conservative" as ideological designations that refer, ultimately , to a classic battle of ideas - social engineering versus free markets; group entitlements versus individual freedom, and so on. But in the United States today, political ideas like these, and the political identities of liberalism and conservatism, have moral reputations that are often more important than the ideas themselves. And these reputations come almost entirely from the idea's association with, or disassociation from, America's long practice of white supremacy.

"Diversity," for example, is a golden word today because it disassociates those who embrace it from white supremacy. "Meritocracy," on the other hand, is verboten because it associates its advocates with racial inequality. It is an idea with a bad moral reputation. Political correctness is simply a language of dissociation, a manner of speaking that helps whites (and institutions) distance themselves from their reputation for racism. This is because we live today in an age of white guilt.

What is white guilt? It is certainly not guilt of conscience. Understandably, whites never tire of telling me that they "don't feel guilty" for the oppression of blacks have endured. Many point to the illogic of feeling guilty for a sin they played no part in. Not long ago, a woman told me she was descended from Yankee abolitionists. What did she have to feel guilty about?

But white guilt does not work by logic or truth; it works by stigma. It is the experience of being stigmatized as a racist simply because one is white. Blacks were stigmatized as inferior also without regard to reason or truth.

[...]

Today, whites have a reputation for being racist even if they are descended from abolitionists.

The age of white guilt began back in the 1960s, when the United States owned up to its long and virulent history of racial oppression. To admit a sin is to become stigmatized with it.... No white person can be seen as decent, and no American institution can be seen as legitimate, without openly dissociating form racism. I call this white guilt because when people are in flight from stigma, they behave guiltily - whether or not they are actually guilty.

[Truepeers: this, it seems to me, is one of the keys to understanding White Guilt: that it is a religion that turns on signs or stigmas of the sacred and sacrificial. Whites are now stigmatized because whiteness is seen as having been, historically, what Eric Gans calls an "unmarked" status. To be "white" is to have been among those not marked for victimization. (I put "white" in quotations because even middle-class blacks may now be seen as being or acting "white", in the sense of appearing unmarked, of having assimilated into the mainstream.) White Guilt, in turn, sacralizes, makes desirable - indeed it make almost essential - some kind of historical victim status by which, or on behalf of which, one can gain entry to the public stage, where politics almost requires its players to make righteous public claims on all those unmarked "white" institutions and individuals that are seen, simply by the logic of their normal, everyday, operations, to have been, historically, against the victim.

The alleged problem with all that is normal is that the normal is seen to be a way of whitewashing, or covering up, some inherent or "systemic" logic of our social system, a logic that requires victims. The normal, according to White Guilt, is really a hidden conspiracy against all those who don't have a successful place, for whatever reason, in the white male capitalist system. The "free" market is really a sham; it's only free for the privileged.

This mode of religious thought allows the advocates of White Guilt to disassociate themselves from responsibility for the virtues necessary to defend, reproduce, and represent the free market system and the system of independent nation states that are ultimately the free market's political guarantors. And, as Steele argues, below, this scapegoating of the whites thus comes back to haunt the blacks and other "victim" groups. The attack on the normal denies "victims" the freedom to find a way to succeed in the free market system. White Guilt offers instead a model of a world run by transnational bureaucratic elites setting about to rectify all the excesses of the normal. But by the very logic of the religion, these excesses and their rectifications are never ending. Any form of capitalism or freedom must create an eternal need for affirmative action. The liberal elites who take this affirmative task upon themselves become the new gods and idols on whom the "victims" depend for any success in this world.]

White guilt is a profound tension and force in American life that affects everything our society now does, from admitting young people to college to fighting wars. In whatever we do, we must first show ourselves redeemed of our bigoted past. So, in the first years of the Iraq war, we were more preoccupied with building roads and schools than with winning the war. We admonished our soldiers not to shoot rioters, not to torture, not to allow collateral damage - not to do any of the things that white Western societies used to do with impunity. Whatever one may think of this, it only makes the point that even war is now contained by white guilt. Moral legitimacy now rivals military victory, and may even supersede it, as the first goal of war.

White guilt has given the West a new international "redemptive" liberalism - not a classic liberalism of freedom but one that ties moral authority to dissociation from past sins. Today's left is after virtue more than freedom, and it is quite willing to use government as an instrument of "the good". Multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance, pacifism - these words have a good reputation today precisely because they seem to redeem the past. When Barack Obama says he would use diplomacy with Iran instead of rattling his sabre, he is practising liberalism's new blueprint for power: virtue as the means to power: Does he really believe that diplomacy sill contain Iran's nuclear ambitions? Hard to say... [white guilt] allows him to ask for power in the name of Western redemption.

All this has left the language of freedom to conservatives, who now sound a lot like Martin Luther King did in 1963. They stand simply for the freedom of the individual, without regard to race, class or gender.

They are informed by a more humble truth than liberals: that government can never redeem society of its past sins, that lost innocence is indeed lost- that it is better, in any case, to be chastened than innocent. The true conservative understands that "diversity" is only a dreamy projection of white innocence that threatens freedom in the same way racism did. In America today, we impose affirmative action on black students whether they want it or not. So, a society guilty of denying freedom to blacks for centuries once again denies it to them, and for the same underlying reason: white aggrandizement.

Race, this old culprit, thus pushes U.S. politics into something of a paradox. It leaves us with a liberalism that buys a good reputation for institutions with a willingness to sacrifice freedom and it leaves us with a conservatism that endures a bad reputation in order to encourage freedom... today's liberalism... fails to see blacks as free men and women; rather it exploits us as a means to an impossible national redemption...