Prometheus 6

In the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinkney has an article about Barack Obama disguised as a review of ol' Shelby's self-expose disguised as a book about Barack Obama. Most of Pinkney's article reviews Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope...takes quite a while to get down to business. Maybe because there's so little in Shelby's book to actually discuss.

Shelby Steele hopes to liberate Obama from his black identity in A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win, a thin and unhappy meditation on what he considers Obama's costly refusal to repudiate the Sixties and its false, politicized definition of blackness. Steele asserts that "the post-sixties black identity is essentially a totalitarian identity." Furthermore, the emphasis black educators place on black identity has been "one of the most debilitating forces in black life since the 60s."

Shelby must feel stupider about the costly refusal thing with every primary.

For Steele, Obama's upbringing created in him an "identity vacuum," but the transparent black identity he constructed for himself comes at the price of excluding from that black identity essential parts of himself—"family values, beliefs, ambitions, loves." He cannot be himself, he cannot bring his own experience into his black identity. Steele refers to a scene in Dreams from My Father in which Obama relates the bad breakup with his long-term white girlfriend in New York, saying that he realized that they would always live in different worlds and that he was the one who knew how to live as an outsider. Assimilation, not blackness, is the key to success, Steele counters, and he insists that Obama knows this, because he grew up in mainstream culture, not black culture....

In A Bound Man, Steele attempts to apply to the election his notions about the uses of "black victimization" and "white guilt" that he worked out in The Content of Our Character. 

Steele sees a connection between identity and competence. But we know that.