Shelby Steele - A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Cant Win

The first thing I ever heard about Barack Obama was that he had a white mother and a black father. Interestingly, the person who informed me of this spoke only matter-of-factly, with no hint of the gossips wicked delight. Yet this piece of information was presented as vital, as one of those all-important facts about a person that, like the first cause of a complex truth, plays a role in everything that follows. Apparently, it is Barack Obamas fate to have notice of his racial pedigree precede even the mention of his politicsas if the pedigree inevitably explains the politics. And I suspect that some people would feel a bit defrauded were they to hear his political ideas and only later learn that he was racially mixed.

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 worlds fascinationif not obsessionwith 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 racedumb because race is used here as a kind of bullying truth that pushes aside actual human experience. So I never know what people really want to know when they ask me what it is like to beand here come the math wordsbiracial or multiracial or multicultural. The self as the answer to an addition problem.

But, as best as I can surmise, what people really want to know is what it is like to have no race to go home to at night. We commonly think of race as a kind of home, a place where they have to take you in; and it seems the very stuff of alienation to live without solid footing in such a home. If this alienation is not nearly as dramatic as the old tragic mulatto stories would suggest, it nevertheless does exist. How could it not in a society like America where race once meant the difference between slavery and freedom? Racist societies enforce the idea of race as home by making race an inescapable fate. So, still today, this fundamentally oddeven primitiveidea remains embedded in our democratic national culture, the legacy of our past. People who are the progeny of two races have a more ambiguous racial fate and, therefore, at least some feeling of homelessness. They stand just outside the reach of that automatic racial solidarity that those born of one race can take for granted.

So, people like Barack Obama and me are always under a degree of suspicion. The one drop rule formulated in the days of slaveryone drop of black blood makes you blackconsigns us to the black race (happily so for me and, I would imagine, for Obama as well), but the fact of an immediate white parent differentiates us and interrupts solidarity with blacks. And all this is worsened by the fact that whites are historically the oppressor race. Thus, by the dumb logic of racial thinking, our very mothers milk comes through a collaboration with the enemy. More literally, this collaboration may mean that we enjoy more exposure to the dominant culture, more advantages in a color-conscious society. Mistrust and even resentment from other blacks often ensues. And from whites come the sneers one commonly hears in reference to Obamahes not even really black.

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak. And both races can squeeze us in a blueslike double bind where the absurdity is as comic as it is tragic: we dismiss you for not being authentically black, yet we will never accept you as authentically black. Ha ha. When people can call you inauthentic and undermine your moral authority, they have a degree of power in relation to you. And where they have power, you have vulnerability.

This would have to be an old and tiresome vulnerability in Barack Obamas 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 in part 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. He practices that brave and aggressive self-disclosure that disarms by taking away the gossips ability to surprise. It is harder to deploy a mans vulnerability against him when he publishes it in a book.

Still, I glimpsed some of the weariness he must feel at having this vulnerability regularly probed in a 60 Minutes interview that aired near the launching of his presidential campaign. It was the usual 60 Minutes setup, the camera in close enough for a dermatological exam. And there sat Obama, perfectly composed and seemingly ready for anything, the now famous ears framing his good looks in eternal boyishness. The correspondent, Steve Kroft, asked a series of predictable political questions and then, hunching forward a bit, entered the territory of identity. There was an allusion to the mixed-race background, and a question about how Obama saw himself. And hereprobably because I knew so well what to look forI saw the very faintest exasperation come into his eyes and then instantly vanish. Barack Obama has no doubt had a lifetime of rehearsals for this moment, and he must have had a hundred answers immediately at hand, all rehearsed to the point of glibness. Yet the answer he finally gave had real pathos precisely because it was so glib.

He was rooted, he said, in the African-American community, but he was also more than that. To be sure, this is the formulation of a man with a very complex identity trying, understandably, to make himself simpler and more recognizable to a society not used to pondering his like. Yet, this is also a formulation that reduces Obamas identity to a banality. What could rooted or more than that mean? How would the two be simultaneously possible? And, for that matter, what could African-American community really mean? A culture? A politics? To become recognizable, he processes himself through the same dumb racial mathhe is one thing plus something elsethat has been the very source of his vulnerability. He collaborates with the same tired racial conventions that made him an odd man out to begin with.