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BT

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For your consideration
« on: December 31, 2009, 02:47:02 AM »

    * The Wall Street Journal

    * OPINION
    * DECEMBER 30, 2009, 10:08 A.M. ET

Obama and Our Post-Modern Race Problem
The president always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol.

 
By SHELBY STEELE

America still has a race problem, though not the one that conventional wisdom would suggest: the racism of whites toward blacks. Old fashioned white racism has lost its legitimacy in the world and become an almost universal disgrace.

The essence of our new "post-modern" race problem can be seen in the parable of the emperor's new clothes. The emperor was told by his swindling tailors that people who could not see his new clothes were stupid and incompetent. So when his new clothes arrived and he could not see them, he put them on anyway so that no one would think him stupid and incompetent. And when he appeared before his people in these new clothes, they too?not wanting to appear stupid and incompetent?exclaimed the beauty of his wardrobe. It was finally a mere child who said, "The emperor has no clothes."

The lie of seeing clothes where there were none amounted to a sophistication?joining oneself to an obvious falsehood in order to achieve social acceptance. In such a sophistication there is an unspoken agreement not to see what one clearly sees?in this case the emperor's flagrant nakedness.

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America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there?all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him. As providence would have it, this was a very effective symbiosis politically. And yet, without self-disclosure on the one hand or cross-examination on the other, Mr. Obama became arguably the least known man ever to step into the American presidency.

Our new race problem?the sophistication of seeing what isn't there rather than what is?has surprised us with a president who hides his lack of economic understanding behind a drama of scale. Hundreds of billions moving into trillions. Dramatic, history-making numbers. But where is the economic logic behind a stimulus package that doesn't fully click in for a number of years? How is every stimulus dollar spent actually going to stimulate? Why bailouts to institutions that only hoard the money? How is vast government spending simultaneously a kind of prudence that will not "add to the deficit?" How can such spending not trigger smothering levels of taxation?

Mr. Obama's economic thinking (or lack thereof) adds up to a kind of rudderless cowboyism combined with wishful thinking. You would think that in the two solid years of daily campaigning leading up to his election this nakedness would have been seen.

On the foreign front he has been given much credit for his new policy on the Afghan war, and especially for the "rational" and "earnest" way he went about arriving at the decision to surge 30,000 new troops into battle. But here also were three months of presidential equivocation for all the world to see, only to end up essentially where he started out.

And here again was the lack of a larger framework of meaning. How is this surge of a piece with America's role in the world? Are we the world's exceptional power and thereby charged with enforcing a certain balance of power, or are we now embracing European self-effacement and nonengagement? Where is the clear center in all this?

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness?not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"?that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"?thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

But then Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask?winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me. Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan and yes, Tiger Woods have all been superb bargainers, eliciting almost reverential support among whites for all that they were not?not angry or militant, not political, not using their moral authority as blacks to exact a wage from white guilt.

But this mask comes at a high price. When blacks become humanly visible, when their true beliefs are known, their mask shatters and their symbiotic bond with whites is broken. Think of Tiger Woods, now so humanly visible. Or think of Bill Cosby, who in recent years has challenged the politically correct view and let the world know what he truly thinks about the responsibility of blacks in their own uplift.

It doesn't matter that Mr. Woods lost his bargainer's charm through self-destructive behavior and that Mr. Cosby lost his through a courageous determination to individuate?to take public responsibility for his true convictions. The appeal of both men?as objects of white identification?was diminished as their human reality emerged. Many whites still love Mr. Cosby, but they worry now that expressing their affection openly may identify them with his ideas, thus putting them at risk of being seen as racist. Tiger Woods, of course, is now so tragically human as to have, as the Bible put it, "no name in the street."

A greater problem for our nation today is that we have a president whose benign?and therefore desirable?blackness exempted him from the political individuation process that makes for strong, clear-headed leaders. He has not had to gamble his popularity on his principles, and it is impossible to know one's true beliefs without this. In the future he may stumble now and then into a right action, but there is no hard-earned center to the man out of which he might truly lead.

And yes, white America conditioned Barack Obama to emptiness?valued him all along for his "articulate and clean" blackness, so flattering to American innocence. He is a president come to us out of our national insecurities.

Mr. Steele is a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704254604574614540488450188.html?mod=rss_opinion_main



BSB

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2009, 04:41:23 AM »
For your consideration:

The man is like Sisyphus, doomed to roll each conservative talking point up a hill, bullet point by bullet point, for the rest of eternity. Steele has been repeating himself as a farce for years now, and it's simply tragic to watch. The grand unifying theory of his career, that (liberal) black people are too busy being "black" to succeed, was shattered on November 4, 2008, and Steele has spent every day since trying to pick up the shards and put them back together.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2009&base_name=enter_shelby_steele

Michael Tee

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #2 on: December 31, 2009, 08:44:07 AM »
Steele sounds good on a first reading, but where's the beef?  In fact, where's the connection to the real world?

I think Steele writes a whole new story of Obama's election, as if it had been the product of race and white guilt, whereas in fact the colour of Obama's skin was far from central to his win.  If anything, it held him back from an even bigger landslide.

IMHO, Obama came to power in a wave of revulsion at the Bush Presidency, when the GOP brand was radioactive and the whole house of cards collapsing before the very eyes of the electorate.  Any Democratic candidate could have beaten any Republican in that race, but the particular GOP candidates offered merely sealed the capstone on the GOP tomb.  McCain and PALIN?  Please.  That election had nothing to do with "willful blindness" arising out of white guilt.  It was about saving the nation from the very catastrophe that was unfolding as the voters went to the polls.  The tidal wave was anti-Bush, not pro-Obama; it was only at the very crest of the wave, where it was almost irrelevant, that voters were comparing Obama to McCain and his "heartbeat-away" veep.

To the usual load of crap, Steele adds in the usual conservative "post-racial" bullshit which flies in the face of every fucking statistic published, particularly rates of incarceration and joblessness, which prove to anyone interested that blacks are not only still sucking hind tit, but getting fucked in the ass by whitey while doing so.

A lot of progressive Americans voted for Obama with their eyes wide open to the possibility that he was shining them on all the time, but what choice did they really have?  When he spoke of change, they thought they knew what kind, but (like myself) had to swallow the doubts.  He had never been specific enough about WHAT kind of change.  There were his Wall Street backers to consider.  Dennis Kucinich was the candidate I would have liked to see, but Dennis never had a chance.

I'd say the book's still open on Obama, but I'm laying odds of 80-20 that the guy is what he now seems to be, a slick-talking phony, a skilled con artist, the tool of interests as sinister as the interests for which Dubya had shilled, in many cases the same interests.  At the same time, I am hopeful that he is what he claimed to be (or what he allowed people like me to believe he was claiming to be) and that his "escalation" of the Afghan war is simply a clever prelude, giving the generals the rope they'll need to hang themselves with, allowing them the surge they asked for, and just biding his time till its inevitable failure and the return of the generals to ask for more, at which time he'll pull the rug right out from under them, counting on their total lack of credibility once their first round of promises has been exploded.

Once again, the editorial pages of the WSJ  do not fail to disappoint.  Talk about the Emperor's new clothes - - that this garbage could masquerade before any crowd as informed wisdom boggles the mind.

Christians4LessGvt

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #3 on: December 31, 2009, 09:40:14 AM »
"Steele writes a whole new story of Obama's election, as if it had been the product of
race and white guilt, whereas in fact the colour of Obama's skin was far from central to
his win"


You can't be serious?

Just about the only reason Obama won was because of his skin color.

Sure there was a Bush backlash....thats exactly the point....just about anybody
from the Democratic Party was going to win...so thats why 2008 allowed a very
inexperienced, new-comer, black candidate to win.

Obama could have never-ever beaten a Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.
He got lucky he ran in a year of "anybody but Bush or Republicans"
and to make it even easier he also ran against an elderly, ugly,
piss poor candidate that is boring as hell.

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" - Ronald Reagan - June 12, 1987

Plane

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #4 on: December 31, 2009, 09:12:11 PM »
A lot of progressive Americans voted for Obama with their eyes wide open to the possibility that he was shining them on all the time, but what choice did they really have?  When he spoke of change, they thought they knew what kind, but (like myself) had to swallow the doubts.


In other words, Steel was correct in his assessment?



http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/individuate

Don't think I will get much mileage out of that word.

Michael Tee

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #5 on: January 01, 2010, 02:26:18 PM »
<< . . . and to make it even easier he also ran against an elderly, ugly,
piss poor candidate that is boring as hell.>>

Oh yeah, as if that were merely some kind of fortuitous break for Obama.  Pure happenstance.

In the summer of 2008, my wife and I went with another couple to the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and wound up sharing a breakfast table with three elderly, blue-rinse Republican ladies from upstate New York.  My ultra-conservative physician friend was the only one at the table who thought McCain could win, but the Republican ladies summed up McCain better than anyone I heard before or since.  They called him the GOP's sacrificial lamb.

2008 was not the Republicans' year.  End of story.

Kramer

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Re: For your consideration
« Reply #6 on: January 01, 2010, 03:17:31 PM »
For your consideration:

The man is like Sisyphus, doomed to roll each conservative talking point up a hill, bullet point by bullet point, for the rest of eternity. Steele has been repeating himself as a farce for years now, and it's simply tragic to watch. The grand unifying theory of his career, that (liberal) black people are too busy being "black" to succeed, was shattered on November 4, 2008, and Steele has spent every day since trying to pick up the shards and put them back together.

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=06&year=2009&base_name=enter_shelby_steele


you don't have a leg to stand on regarding those statements -- does he define himself conservative or republican, yes indeed he's republican