Shelby Steele

Gawd, this man bugs me.  The man is Shelby Steele and he crawls under my skin like a rash.

I can't embed it, so take a moment and watch this video interview between Steele and Peter Robinson, writer for the conservative website National Review Online.  (Note what a denizen of NRO I've become -- they fascinate me.)

Done?

Okay, several things to notice.  First, at no point during the interview does Mr. Steele refer to black people in the possessive.  It's all about "they" and "them."  From an argument's standpoint, as to him arguing the premise of his book -- entitled by the way "A Bound Man:  Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (heh heh heh) -- cold reasoning takes a certain amount of disconnect from the inhabitants of the argument.  I get that.  But it makes me wonder, and not for the first time, if Mr. Steele is aware that he is black.

Second, he offers the idea that black people wear masks and as example, he names two black men -- horn players.  Louis Armstrong, he says, wears a "bargainer" mask but what I distinctly perceived in his explanation, though he didn't say it outright, is that Armstrong is basically an Uncle Tom.  Miles Davis, he says, wears a "challenger" mask.  The angry black man.  Both, he posits, got where they got to be by wearing a mask to make white people feel good about themselves and thereby acquiring a measure of success for themselves; Armstrong by tomming and Davis by scowling and making the white people LIKE it.

I don't disagree with his concept of masks.  Anyone black who has watched an older friend or relative completely change in the presence of white people knows the ritual of the wearing of the mask.  Hell, to some extent, most people of color don a mask at some point.  Where I diverge from Mr. Steele's logic is that how white people feel about themselves enters into the equation.  I don't think white people's self-worth is a chip in the game.  White's feelings of self-worth is a secure given regardless of how much Satchmo grins or Miles grimaces.  In the end, it's merely about being able to do what one does.

Third, and this is a tent pole of much of Steele's philosophy, that black agency promotes and fosters white guilt thereby rendering it a driving force in the success of any black person in America, specifically Obama as agent and recipient.  That Obama may have offered an alternative path to the American electorate weary of lies and subterfuge, doesn't seem to enter his argument.  I may be wrong in that since I have not yet read his book about how Obama can't win.

Last, Steele says in this interview, "White America has made tremendous moral progress since the '60s... And they've never given themselves credit for that."  I'm firmly in the Chris Rock school of philosophy on this matter; you don't get credit for what you're supposed to do.  And really, white folks don't need to give themselves credit when Shelby Steele is there to do it for them.  Who is it then, honestly, stroking white folks' guilt?

This man just bugs.