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Shelby Steele on Barack Obama: Who "just can't win?"
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[Steele's likening Obama to Oprah is an appealing idea. Yes, both are
"bargainers" who've bought into the white power structure and who've
successfully gone after the white world's brass ring. (So, for that
matter, is Steele himself). But his analysis breaks down in several
ways. First of all, Oprah is not a professional politician running for
public office. Steele also tends to ignore the roles of gender and
class. Think of Maxine Waters, Cynthia McKinney and Shirley Chisholm,
all much more radical examples of black politicians who are/were TRULY
for change and so were more "dangerous" to the white establishment.
They're also women, which makes them less "dangerous" in the public
consciousness, especially to whites. A less radical example is the late
Barbara Jordan, whom Jimmy Carter should have nominated for Attorney
General.
Black men in politics are the most dangerous, and so unless they play
nice they are shut out, marginalized or neutered by rumor and scandal,
as in the case of Jesse Jackson. If that doesn't work they are simply
killed (Malcolm and Martin) unless they are right-wing toads like
Clarence Thomas. Best of all for the white right-wing racist
establishment, of course, are black women politicians who are would-be
whites AND right-wing toads like Condi Rice.
Below are several recent pieces by and interviews with Steele on the
Obama topic, including a piece on why Obama is right about Iran.
Steele is somewhat unfairly excoriated by publications such as the Black
Commentator as if he is Clarence Thomas. He's not. But Steele isn't
exactly fair, either, to use terms like "vanilla" when he talks about
Barack Obama. Yet, his writing reveals Steele to be more sensitive,
psychologically aware and honest than one would expect from reading
only his angry critics.
Steele is more self-revealing than he knows, perhaps, when he
talks about Obama's personality and motivation primarily in terms of his
mixed-race "mulatto" background and the quest for black identity. And--
perhaps for his own personal reasons of accommodation -- Steele both
overemphasizes, and underplays, the role of race at the same time.
Steele is also a twin, which introduces yet another psychological
dimension. If Obama is up for grabs by Steele'e psychoanalytic
interpretation, he shouldn't be immune to the same sort of scrutiny.
When he writes about Obama Baracka, the mixed-race Shelby Steele seems
to identify strongly with his subject and perhaps envy Obama's his
devoted mother and his childhood experiences outside the USA.
Shelby's twin brother Claude is a social psychologist and professor at
Stanford who, given his work on stereotypes and addiction (especially
alcoholism), and his publications and citations appears to be much
less conservative than Shelby. The two of them would probably make an
fascinating psychological study in their own right. They are children
of the Sixties (born in 1946).
Here are a few other references for anyone interested in this
intelligent, politically right-wing and ideologically wrong-headed
scholar:
"Freedom Rider: Shelby Steele Loves White Supremacy," by Margaret
Kimberley, The Black Commentator, May 11, 2006
http://www.blackcommentator.com/183/183_freedom_rider_shelby_steele.html
Wikipedia bio - Shelby Steele
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelby_Steele
Wikipedia bio - Claude Steele, Shelby's twin brother
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Steele
-NY Transfer]
***
NPR - Dec 4, 2007
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16879342
[Listen to the interview via an audio link at page above]
Shelby Steele: Why Obama Can't Win
NPR News & Notes, December 4, 2007 Writer Shelby Steele has spent a
lifetime thinking and writing about race and racial politics in America.
His latest book, "A Bound Man," looks at racial identity and the
populous [sic] politics which have made up much of Sen. Barack Obama's
political career.
Though Obama is now the front-runner in Iowa's Democratic presidential
caucuses, Steele " a research fellow at the Hoover Institution " says
he can't win.
***
TIME Rag - Nov 30, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1689619,00.html
The Identity Card
By Shelby Steele
The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white
mother and a black father. I heard this over and over again, never in a
snide or gossipy way, always matter-of-factly. Apparently this was the
way we Americans had to introduce Obama to each other. For some reason,
knowledge of his racial pedigree had to precede even the mention of his
politics--as if the pedigree inevitably explained the politics.
Of course, I am rather sensitive to all this because I, too, was born
to a white mother and a black father, though I did not fully absorb
this fact, which would have been so obvious to the outside world, until
I was old enough to notice the world's fascination--if not
obsession--with it. To this day it is all but impossible for me to
actually stop and think of my parents as white and black or to think of
myself, therefore, as half and half. This is the dumb mathematics of
thinking by race--dumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying
truth that pushes aside the actual human experience.
Racist societies make race into a hard fate. So people who are the
progeny of two races become curiosities not because they are
particularly interesting, but because they are so unexpected. This must
be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obama's life (as it is
in mine), and all the more so because he has chosen a public life. One
senses that his first book, "Dreams from My Father," was meant to
diffuse some of this vulnerability. In it he does not merely own up to
his interracial background as if to a past indiscretion; he candidly
explores it. And his brave self-disclosure succeeds because we no
longer live in an America that wants to make mixed-race people into
pariahs. That was once done to keep firm the racial boundaries of
American apartheid--the mulatto's tragic exile standing as a cautionary
tale meant to keep people "with their own kind." But today's mixed-race
person is "fresh," a word that trails Obama like a nickname.
There is the unspoken hope that his mixed-race freshness carries a
broader political originality. And, in fact, he does embody something
that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that
race is but a negligible human difference. Here is the radicalism,
innate to his pedigree, which automatically casts him as the perfect
antidote to America's exhausted racial politics. This is the radicalism
by which Martin Luther King Jr. put Americans in touch--if only
briefly--with their human universality. Barack Obama is the progeny of
this idealism. As such, he is a living rebuke to both racism and
racialism, to both segregation and identity politics--any form of
collective chauvinism.
Thus, the cultural and historical implications of Obama's candidacy are
clearly greater than its public policy implications. While Obama the
man labors in the same political vineyard as his competitors, mapping
out policy positions on everything from war to health care, his
candidacy itself asks the American democracy to complete itself, to
achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no
veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself
forward as the individual he truly is. This is the high possibility
that the Obama campaign points to quite apart from its policy goals.
The Struggle to Belong
And yet the issue of race, so nicely contained and deactivated in the
Barack Obama political persona, is still very much alive within the man
himself. Today's black identity has been nearly a life-long
preoccupation for Obama. By the surface facts of his life--mixed-race
background, childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia--it would be easy to
assume that he might be indifferent to the whole business of race and
identity. Many Americans want to believe that there are people on whom
race sits very lightly, people whose very hybridism suggests the
possibility of transcending race.
But Barack Obama is not such a person. His books show a man nothing
less than driven by a determination to be black, as if blackness were
more a specific achievement than a birthright. This drive puts Obama at
odds with his own political persona. Much of the excitement that
surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly
tethered to race. Yet the very arc of his life--from Hawaii to the
South Side of Chicago--has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to
"belong" irrefutably to the black identity.
What sort of alienation drives this resolve? When, at the age of 2,
Barack Obama was abandoned by his African father, he lost both a father
and accessibility to a black identity--not necessarily a politicized
identity but that much simpler and more profound feeling of
unselfconsciously belonging to a people. Here was a kid, accountable in
the world as a black, being raised by whites--mother, grandmother, and
grandfather. Nothing in the world wrong with this. In fact, the fine
young man that Obama became has to be credited in large part to the
devotion of his extraordinary mother--a woman who, in Indonesia, got
her young son up at 4 five days a week to run him through English
lessons before his Indonesian school day even began. And yet absences,
like father and race, can quite irrationally open up deep--almost
insatiable--longings.
So after college Barack Obama spent three years as a community
organizer on the South Side of Chicago. I spent my first three years
after college in the late '60s working in Great Society programs in
East St. Louis, Ill. These were encounters with deep, seemingly
intractable, black poverty. And I am sure that Obama, like me, was
motivated by a genuine desire to do something good. But on another
level these were also very likely quests for racial authenticity--for a
resolution of that peculiar alienation that trails mixed-race people,
that absence of a simple racial solidarity that is the easy birthright
of others. When Obama is about to leave Chicago for Harvard Law School,
he wonders: "Was that all that had brought me to Chicago, I
wondered--the desire for such simple acceptance?"
So, yes, Obama's interracial background puts him at cross purposes. It
gives him a racelessness that is politically appealing to whites, but
it also draws him toward precisely the kind of self-conscious black
identity that alienates whites. For nearly two decades Barack Obama has
attended a black church on the South Side of Chicago that his own
mother could never have felt comfortable in. It subscribes to a "Black
Value System" in which "black" was always the operative word--"black
family," "black community," "black freedom," etc. But it was not a
black value system that accounted for Obama's success in life; it was
the values of his white Midwestern mother. Could he stand up in his own
church and say this?
People do well because they are loved and because much is asked of
them--not because they are black or white. Their own sense of
responsibility is always their greatest asset. Whatever consolations
blackness may offer, it is not an agent. It does nothing. And there is
indeed a "fresh" politics to be made from these simple truths. Who
better to do this than Barack Obama? Here, within his own actual
experience, is his chance to deliver the "freshness" that so many
Americans look for in him.
Caught in the Middle
But Obama is not likely to take this path. He is a man bound by forces
outside himself and by a practice that is central to the minority
experience in America: masking. As the word itself makes clear, the
mask is not an authentic representation of one's true self; rather it
is a presentation of the self that angles for advantage. Today we
blacks have two great masks that we wear for advantage in the American
mainstream: bargaining and challenging.
Bargainers make a deal with white Americans that gives whites the
benefit of the doubt: I will not rub America's history of racism in
your face, if you will not hold my race against me. Especially in our
era of political correctness, whites are inevitably grateful for this
bargain that spares them the shame of America's racist past. They
respond to bargainers with gratitude, warmth, and even affection. This
"gratitude factor" can bring the black bargainer great popularity.
Oprah Winfrey is the most visible bargainer in America today.
Challengers never give whites the benefit of the doubt. They assume
whites are racist until they prove otherwise. And whites are never
taken off the hook until they (institutions more than individuals) give
some form of racial preference to the challenger. Al Sharpton and Jesse
Jackson are today's best known challengers. Of course, most blacks can
and do go both ways, but generally we tend to lean one way or another.
Barack Obama is a plausible presidential candidate today because he is
a natural born bargainer. Obama--like Oprah--is an opportunity for
whites to think well of themselves, to give themselves one of the most
self-flattering feelings a modern white can have: that they are not
racist. He is the first to apply the bargainer's charms to presidential
politics. Sharpton and Jackson were implausible presidential candidates
because they suffered the charmlessness of challengers. Even given
white guilt, no one wants to elect a scold.
But the great problem for Obama is that today's black identity is
grounded in challenging. This is the circumstance that makes him a
bound man. If he tries to win the black vote by taking on a posture of
challenging, he risks losing the vote of whites who like him precisely
because he does not challenge. And if his natural bargaining wins white
votes, he risks losing black votes to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because
Hillary Clinton always identifies with black challengers like Al
Sharpton. This makes her "blacker" than Barack Obama.
There is only one way out of this bind for this still young politician.
He has to drop all masks, all obsessions with identity, all his fears
of being called a sell-out, and very carefully come to reveal what he
truly believes as an individual. This is what America really expects
from Barack Obama.
***
Opinion Journal (Wall Street Journal) - Nov 26, 2007
http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110010909
Obama Is Right on Iran
Talking with Tehran may help us wage the wars we need to fight.
BY SHELBY STEELE
After a recent Democratic presidential debate, Barack Obama proclaimed
that were he to become president, he would talk directly even to
America's worst enemies. One could imagine President Obama as a kind of
superhero taking off in Air Force One for Tehran, there to be greeted
on the tarmac by the villainous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Was this a serious foreign policy proposal or simply a campaign
counterpunch? Hillary Clinton had already held up this idea as evidence
of Mr. Obama's naivet(c). Wasn't he just pushing back, displaying his
commitment to "diplomacy"--now the most glamorous word in the
Democratic "antiwar" lexicon?
Whatever Mr. Obama's intent, history has given his idea a rather bad
reputation. Neville Chamberlain springs to mind as a man who was
famously seduced into the wishful thinking that seems central to the
idea of talking to one's enemies. Today few Americans--left or
right--would be comfortable with direct talks between our president and
a character like Mr. Ahmadinejad. Wouldn't such talk only puff up
extremist leaders and make America into a supplicant?
On its face, Mr. Obama's idea seems little more than a far-left
fantasy. But perhaps it looks this way because we are viewing it
through too narrow a conception of warfare. We tend to think of our
wars as miniature versions of World War II, a war of national survival.
But since then we have fought wars in which our national survival was
not immediately, or even remotely, at stake. We have fought wars in
distant lands for rather abstract reasons, and there has been the
feeling that these were essentially wars of choice: We could win or
lose without jeopardizing our nation's survival.
Mr. Obama's idea clearly makes no sense in a context of national
survival. It would have been absurd for President Roosevelt to fly to
Berlin and talk to Hitler. But Mr. Obama's idea does make sense in the
buildup to wars where survival is not at risk--wars that are more a
matter of urgent choice than of absolute necessity.
I think of such wars as essentially wars of discipline. Their purpose
is to preserve a favorable balance of power that is already in place in
the world. We fight these wars not to survive but--once a menace has
arisen--to discipline the world back into a balance of power that best
ensures peace. We fight as enforcers rather than as rebels or as
patriots fighting for survival. Wars of discipline are pre-emptive by
definition. They pre-empt menace to the peaceful world order. We don't
sacrifice blood and treasure for change; we sacrifice for constancy.
Conversely, in wars of survival, like World War II, we fight to achieve
a favorable balance of power--one in which a peace is established that
guarantees our sovereignty and survival. We fight unapologetically for
dominance, and we determine to defeat our enemy by any means necessary.
We do not harry ourselves much over the style of warfare--whether the
locals like us, where the line between interrogation and torture might
lie, whether or not we are solicitous of our captive's religious
beliefs or dietary strictures. There is no feeling in society that we
can afford to lose these wars. And so we never have.
All this points to one of the great foreign policy dilemmas of our
time: In the eyes of many around the world, and many Americans as well,
we lack the moral authority to fight the wars that we actually fight
because they are wars more of discipline than of survival, more of
choice than of necessity. It is hard to equate the disciplining of a
pre-existing world order--a status quo--with fighting for one's life.
When survival is at stake, there is no lack of moral authority, no
self-doubt and no antiwar movement of any consequence. But when war is
not immediately related to survival, when a society is fundamentally
secure and yet goes to war anyway, moral authority becomes a profound
problem. Suddenly such a society is drawn into a struggle for moral
authority that is every bit as intense as its struggle for military
victory.
America does not do so well in its disciplinary wars (the Gulf War is
an arguable exception) because we begin these wars with only a marginal
moral authority and then, as time passes, even this meager store of
moral capital bleeds away. Inevitably, into this vacuum comes a
clamorous and sanctimonious antiwar movement that sets the bar for
American moral authority so high that we must virtually lose the war in
order to meet it. There must be no torture, no collateral damage, no
cultural insensitivity, no mistreatment of prisoners and no truly
aggressive or definitive display of American military power. In other
words, no victory.
Meanwhile our enemy is fighting all out to achieve a new balance of
power. As we anguish over the possibility of collateral damage, this
enemy practices collateral damage as a tactic of war. In Iraq, al Qaeda
blows up women and children simply to keep alive the chaos of war that
gives it cover. This enemy's sense of moral authority--as misguided as
it may be--is so strong that it compensates for its lack of
sophisticated military hardware.
On the other hand, our great military might is not enough to compensate
for our weak sense of moral authority, our ambivalence. If we have the
greatest military in history, it is also true that we lack our enemy's
talent for true belief. Our rationale for war is difficult to
articulate, always arguable, and distinctly removed from immediate
necessity. Our society is deeply divided and there is a vigorous
antiwar movement ready to capitalize on our every military setback.
This is the pattern of disciplinary wars: Their execution is always
undermined by their inbuilt lack of moral authority. In the end, our
might neutralizes our might. Our vast power makes all such wars come
off as bullying, even when we fight selflessly for the freedom of
others.
Great power scares unless it is exercised within a painstaking moral
framework. Thus, moral authority is the single greatest challenge of
American foreign policy. This is especially so in wars of discipline,
wars fought far away and for abstract reasons. We argue for such wars
as if they were wars of survival because we want the moral authority
that comes so automatically to them. But Iraq is a war of discipline,
and no more. If we left Iraq tomorrow there would be terrible
consequences all around, but we would survive.
Our broader war against terror, on the other hand, is a war of
survival. And it is rich in moral authority. September 11 introduced
necessity and, in its name, we have an open license to destroy that
stateless network of terrorism that attacked us. America is not divided
over this. It was Iraq--a war of discipline--that brought us division.
This does not mean that the Iraq war is invalid. Ultimately, it may
prove to be a far more important war in preserving a balance of power
favorable to America than our war against al Qaeda.
The point is that wars of discipline will always have to be
self-consciously fought on a moral as well as a military front. And the
more we engage the moral struggle, the more license we will have to
fight these wars as wars of survival. In other words, our military
effectiveness now requires nothing less than a smart and daring
brinkmanship of moral authority.
If Mr. Obama's idea was born of mushy idealism, it could work far
better as a hard-nosed moral brinkmanship. Were an American president
(or a secretary of state for the less daring) to land in Tehran, the
risk to American prestige would be enormous. The mullahs would make us
characters in a tale of their own grandeur. Yet moral authority would
redound to us precisely for making ourselves vulnerable to this kind of
exploitation. The world would witness not the stereotype of American
bullying, but the reality of American selflessness, courage and moral
confidence.
If we were snubbed, if all our entreaties to peace were flouted, if war
became inevitable, then we would have the moral authority to fight as
if for survival. Either our high-risk diplomacy works or we have the
license to fight to win. In the meantime, we give our allies around the
world every reason to respect us.
This is not an argument for Mr. Obama's candidacy, only for his idea.
It is a good one because it allows America the advantage of its own
great character.
[Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover
Institution, is the author, most recently, of "A Bound Man: Why We Are
Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win," published next week by Free
Press. ]
***
Toronto Globe & Mail - Oct 20, 2007
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20071020.wsteele20/BNStory/specialComment/home
Why 'vanilla-nice' Obama will lose to Clinton
By MARGARET WENTE
Race-relations scholar Shelby Steele is among the boldest thinkers in
America - and also one of the most controversial. His recent book
"White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of
the Civil Rights Era" is a brilliantly argued and uncompromising
condemnation of self-serving white liberals and self-victimizing black
leaders. It is also a moving meditation on his own journey from the
racist world of his Chicago youth. His forthcoming book, "A Bound Man,"
focuses on Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama.
While he is praised by conservative thinkers such as George Will, many
black intellectuals charge that Mr. Steele is politically naive at
best. Princeton's Cornel West argues that Mr. Steele's ideas apply only
to "a very small slice of black folk" and risk minimizing "the degree
to which racism is deeply, deeply seated in Western civilization."
Mr. Steele is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Harvard
University, and has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and
the National Humanities Medal. He will speak in Toronto next Wednesday
as part of the Grano lecture series.
Here, in a wide-ranging conversation, he discusses Mr. Obama's race for
the presidency, black opportunism, white guilt and why everyone loves
Oprah Winfrey.
MARGARET WENTE: We love Barack Obama up here in Canada. He may even be
more popular than Hillary Clinton. On the campaign trail, he gets
mobbed by crowds of white people. But you say it's all about gratitude.
What do you mean by that?
SHELBY STEELE: White people are thrilled when a prominent black person
comes along and doesn't rub their noses in racial guilt. With whites,
black people wear two kinds of mask. There's the Challenger, who says:
You are racist until you prove otherwise. Those are the Jesse Jackson
and Al Sharpton types that shake down white America with guilt. The
other is the Bargainer, who says: I will not shove the history of
racism in your face if you do not hold your history of racism against
me.
Oprah is the great bargainer of the moment. Whites know they can watch
Oprah and not be shamed by the history of racism. The gratitude is just
overwhelming, and it transforms into very warm affection. The bargainer
knows that. There's so much reciprocity of warmth built up over the
years that people like Oprah and Bill Cosby have become what I call
iconic Negroes.
I'd guess that Obama is a bargainer.
Obama is naturally a bargainer. And that is the source of his enormous
appeal. By supporting him, you can feel that you're not a racist. Among
Republicans, he polls higher than John McCain. Even if people think
they're not going to vote for him, they still like him and wish him
well.
The subtext has to do with the whole history of race relations in North
America, and he has tapped into it very effectively. That explains how
someone can come from the Illinois state legislature and two years
later, incredibly, be running for president.
You're saying that white people can't see him for who he really is.
What's your take on him?
Personally, he's a nice enough guy - nice, but vanilla nice, not much
sense of humour. He's very smart and a very talented politician. He's
very good at articulating both sides of a position and carving out a
middle ground, although he hasn't said much about his deep convictions.
His first book is a first-class autobiography - there's never been
anybody on the presidential level who can write like that.
Sounds good so far. So what's the downside?
He's got to keep on pleasing white folks without offending black folks,
and vice versa. But the national black leadership is grounded in
challenging. They do the opposite of bargaining. They rub racism in the
face of whites. This is what they really mean when they say about
Obama, "Are you really black?" What they mean is, "Are you a
challenger?" But if he does that, he loses with whites.
He's bound between these two forces - challenging and bargaining. And
that's a high-wire act. How in God's name do you pull that off if you
have to shake down whites and also make them comfortable? He's in a
tough spot, and it makes him stay away from strong policy positions,
not just on race issues. It has prevented him from evolving deep and
profound convictions. No one really knows what the man really believes,
I think least of all himself.
He needs to say: I'm an individual and this is what I believe as an
individual. But if he did develop real conviction, he would lose the
gratitude. This is something that all blacks suffer from - all do. It
becomes obvious in Obama's case because he's running for president.
My feeling is that Barack Obama has not developed a true voice yet.
People project things on him, but he's a little more empty than we
think.
You have serious doubts that he can win. So who's your money on right
now?
Hillary. She looks indomitable. She has a 53-per-cent approval rating,
and she's won the debate contest with Obama. I don't know anybody on
the Republican side who has a machine that well oiled. She looks like
the next president right now.
Who's the Republicans' best shot?
Rudy Giuliani. He fights like a dog and he knows what he believes. He
has deep convictions and articulates them very passionately. He would
give her the fight of her life.
Is there any prominent black figure who doesn't wear the mask?
Clarence Thomas. He wears no mask at all. He's not a bargainer or a
challenger. He's his own man. He has deep and profound convictions. You
can take them or leave them, but he is unwavering. He is a rather
heroic figure - the freest black man in America.
Blacks who stand up as individuals in their own communities are shunned
- - they're called self-hating. Blacks loathe him because he won't play
the challenging game. They've called him an Uncle Tom. So if you are a
white person and you like him, that means you are a racist. President
[George W.] Bush doesn't want to be in a photo alone with him. That's
the enormous price this man has paid for being his own man.
In your book White Guilt, you argue that victim-focused racial identity
politics has stifled black advancement more than racism itself has. How
has this happened?
One of the most amazing events of the 20th century was the moral
development of white America. I knew America when it was comfortably
racist with impunity. Today, the entire Western world fully
acknowledges the evil of racism and whites live under this stigma.
They've lost an enormous amount of power because they have lost moral
authority. White people are terrified of being seen as racist.
Meantime, the new black identity has been defined by group
victimization. The unwritten law is that no black problem - high crime
rates, high rates of illegitimacy, poor academic performance - can be
defined as largely a black responsibility, because it is an injustice
to make victims responsible for their own problems. Racism no longer
has any authority to it - it doesn't mean much and it doesn't hold you
back much. But if you're black, you can't say that, because you'll lose
power. Your guilt is our power.
Why is it that whites, not blacks, are the strongest supporters of
affirmative action?
White people need cover. They think, if I can support affirmative
action, it shows I'm not a racist. These policies exist, I believe,
entirely for the purpose of institutionalizing that kind of cover. You
can't be in business today and not have diversity programs. It doesn't
matter whether diversity helps minorities - it helps the institutions.
It gives them moral legitimacy.
No white person can say what they really think to blacks - or native
Canadians - because they don't have the moral authority. If they do,
they will instantly evoke this stigma. Look at people like Don Imus,
who made a three-word mistake. You are vaporized. There is no
redemption. You are worse than a pedophile. You are banished from
society.
Don Imus is not a racist. He just made a stupid, stupid mistake. But if
you make racist remarks in the workplace, you are completely finished.
The joke blacks tell now is that when they go into a white situation
they say, "Watch out - I have Al Sharpton on speed dial."
What's been the impact of black power on blacks?
It's been ruinous. It's had the worst impact of anything short of
slavery. It's given us the idea that our future is going to come from
the manipulation of white people rather than from our own imaginative
creativity and hard work. A worse thing couldn't happen to a group than
to feel that our future is tied up with manipulating white people. It's
taken the life out of black American culture. It's a very sad, tragic
thing. The pursuit of black power is the worst thing we can do. It's
the kiss of death. Seventy per cent of all black children are born out
of wedlock. What's black power going to do about that?
Do you see a way out of this self-defeating trap?
The only way we're going to get out is a merciless focus on academics -
so that blacks can become intellectually competitive in modern society.
If we don't do that, we'll be at the bottom for the next 100 years.
Black kids do poorly and drop out because their parents don't give a
damn. They don't read to their kids when they're small, they don't
speak in complete sentences, they don't give them language. So the
black kids in America come to kindergarten two years behind white
people. No school system is going to make up for that.
The only social programs that will ever work are ones that ask
something of people - and we've never had that. They're all white-guilt
policies. Whites don't think they have the moral authority to ask
anything of black people, certainly not to judge them. But there's
something wrong with people who have a 70-per-cent illegitimacy rate.
This is a group of people who are lost. But we are surrounded by whites
who refuse to tell us that. The system works very well for whites -
affirmative action is a cheap price to pay to fight off that stigma.
But for blacks, especially the bottom half, it's built for failure.
Talk a bit about your own background. I know that you grew up in
Chicago during the last decade of segregation.
Yes, it was still the era of racism. My parents met in the civil-rights
movement in the early 40s, and I grew up as a civil-rights child. I
went to a segregated all-black school that was terrible. So my mother
and father organized the community to boycott the school. It was a
rough fight. Then, in 1960, they got me into a white high school.
When I was in college the black power movement began to burgeon, and I
became very much a part of that. But even in my most passionate moments
I had doubt. People who talked black power weren't going to school.
They were using it as an opportunity to drop out and have fantasies of
pan-Africanism and so forth. But common sense tells you that no matter
what you may think of whites, you still have to compete in the most
competitive society on earth. There is no room to indulge.
By the mid-seventies, I had plowed my way through graduate school. I
was married and had kids to support. The real world was all over me. I
began to see that opportunity was everywhere and that I could do
anything I wanted to do so long as I was willing to apply myself and
work at it. The veil began to lift, and it became clearer and clearer
to me that black power was just making fools of us. We needed to get
serious about development.
What's your definition of a black conservative?
Anybody who says the No. 1 black problem is not racism.
On a personal note, you've said that a black conservative will surely
meet a stunning amount of demonization, misunderstanding, and flat-out
contempt. How do you deal with that?
Well, I have the company of other black conservatives. Thomas Sowell,
the first real black conservative, says we could all meet in a phone
booth.
It's not easy, and I accept this. If you're going to push against
something, you're going to get blowback, especially if you push against
something that has a lot of fear around it. Privately, blacks come up
to me all the time, and they're complimentary and very thoughtful. They
really want to talk and think about these things. They just don't want
to do it in front of white people. They think, you can't let white
people see you doing that, because you'll lose power. And they're right.
There's more colour-consciousness than ever, and that's sad.
"Individual" is a very negative word in black America today. People
forget that Martin Luther King talked about blacks as individuals. He
said: "We want to be free, because we're human beings." If Martin
Luther King were alive today, he'd be a conservative.
[Margaret Wente is a columnist for The Globe and Mail.]
*
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