The Tragedy of Shelby Steele
by Brien Jackson
Shelby Steele has a column in today’s Wall Street Journal that is, amazingly, quite possibly the single most pathetic thing Steele has ever written. Adam Serwer says that Steele has gotten “predictable,” but I’m not sure that’s right. For one thing, Steele has always been predictable. He’s only got one trick, after all. No, at this point Steele has just become dishonest. If before you could make the case that he was being obtuse or making problematic, broad based claims, reading this effort, there’s simply no way to argue Steele doesn’t understand exactly what he’s doing in getting basic facts wrong, things he’s gotten wrong before.
For example, Steele continues to downplay President Obama with the same rhetoric he was using before the election, even implying that he was correct then:
I have called Mr. Obama a bound man because he cannot win white support without bargaining and he cannot maintain minority support without playing the very identity politics that injure him with whites. The latter form of politics is grounded in being what I call a challenger — i.e., someone who presumes that whites are racist until they prove otherwise by granting preferences of some kind to minorities. Whites quietly seethe at challengers like Jesse Jackson who use the moral authority of their race’s historic grievance to muscle for preferential treatment. Mr. Obama has been loved precisely because he was an anti-Jackson, a bargainer who grants them innocence before asking for their support.
Now, the most obvious intellectual problem here is that Steele doesn’t note that the sub-title to his “bound man” critique included a cliam that Obama “can’t win,” which would seem to be significantly undermined by the fact that Obama, you know, won. And what’s more, Steele isn’t even making an explanation as to why he was really right, even though he seemed to be spectacularly wrong, he’s just disappearing the fact altogether. Secondly, Steele is continuing the rhetoric from his post-election column that Obama somehow seduced white people into voting for him, even though Obama didn’t improve much on the level of support John Kerry or Al Gore enjoyed among white voters. Again, it’s not that Steele is “wrong,” it’s that he’s explaining why something happened, even though it didn’t happen. And he’s just pretending no one ever pointed out that he was just wrong about the facts of the matter (which he might believe, since it really wouldn’t make sense for Steele to read criticism of his parlor act, would it?).
Even more dishonestly, Steele rips Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” remark out of context even more egregiously than most other conservatives have:
Throughout her career Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated a Hispanic chauvinism so extreme that it sometimes crosses into outright claims of racial supremacy, as in 2001 when she said in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, “a wise Latina woman . . . would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male.”
Steele doesn’t even note that the broader context of the speech related to racial discrimination cases, he eliminates Sotomayor’s reference to the differing experiences of people of different identity groups. So yes, in this context, you certainly could come away thinking that Sotomayor was making the claim that Latina women are inherently superior to white men, but this isn’t Sotomayor’s quote. It’s an edited snippet of the quote that drastically changes the meaning of the remark. Steele isn’t even attempting to provide an accurate depiction of Sotomayor’s opinion, he’s hacking her words up in such a way as to change what she said, and he knows it. So far, this is the first time I’ve seen someone of any political persuasion edit out the “experiences” part of the quote, and it’s not as though this hasn’t been remarked upon heavily. This is just intellectual dishonesty of the highest form, which shouldn’t really surprise anyone who’s familiar with the bulk of Steele’s work, but what’s really striking is the degree to which Shelby isn’t even trying to hide it anymore. It’s right out there, and it’s extremely lazy in its construction.
Of course, this is still Shelby Steele, so the cheap racism is still there because, well, that’s what Shelby Steele exists to provide:
The Sotomayor nomination commits the cardinal sin of identity politics: It seeks to elevate people more for the political currency of their gender and ethnicity than for their individual merit. (Here, too, is the ugly faithlessness in minority merit that always underlies such maneuverings.) Mr. Obama is promising one thing and practicing another, using his interracial background to suggest an America delivered from racial corruption even as he practices a crude form of racial patronage. From America’s first black president, and a man promising the “new,” we get a Supreme Court nomination that is both unoriginal and hackneyed.
But of course, Steele doesn’t actually demonstrate that Sotomayor lacks individual merit. He predictably brings up the Ricci case but, also predictably, does so without making any mention of the relevant statutes or precedent. Like every other conservative commentary on the case, the decision is simply taken to be wrong for the simple reason that conservatives don’t approve of the outcome. But other than that, there’s nothing. Steele doesn’t make the case that Sotomayor lacks formal qualifications (because that would be too absurd even for him), he doesn’t dig through her career to find any sort of example that would show her to be unqualified in a substantive manner, in part because that’s not what Shelby Steele’s work is built around. Rather, because Sotomayor is a woman and a racial minority, it must be taken for granted that affirmative action is at work he. An hispanic female is ipso facto less qualified than a white man, the same way any other minority is in Shelby Steele’s world. Minorities in general, and black people in particular, don’t get ahead in that world on their own merits, unless, of course, they’re conservatives. Someone ought to ask Shelby Steele what he thinks of Michael Steele, and whether or not the latter would have his current position if the Democrats hadn’t elected the nation’s first black President.
Tags: race, Racist Wankers, Shelby Steele, Sonia Sotomayor
Excellent analysis! I followed you over from TAPPED; glad you left the link. I especially like the way you understand that Steele is not a tragic figure who once showed promise.
A careful reading of that first essay which brought him recognition, pu8blished in Harper’s, no less, reveals the fundamentally same Shelby Steele we see today – it’s all there: the completely rigged sociological observations, i.e., the typical black Berkeley student who fails because he spends more time shooting pool than studying, and then becomes an activist, justifying his own failure by denouncing racism, when, in fact, the loudest activist voices among African-American college students are and have always been the ones who have succeeded, i.e., Sister Souljah, who was an honor student at Cornell, I believe. And Steele’s historical observations are just as skewed, especially the use he makes of Dr. King, whose content of our character line Steele used for the title of the his first published book of essays.
Despite all the “thoughtful” bows to complexity, the essay did what “conservatives” have been doing since Nixon, and what Steele continues to define as his personal project; reordering an analysis of American racism, past and present, to revitalize the hoariest cliche of that racism, that it is whites who are the victims, African-Americans who are the perps. With Sotomayor’s nomination, it becomes even clearer it’s the “right wing” that invented “identity politics, just as they invented “quotas,” and that Steele is as happy slandering any minority as he has always been willing to do to African-Americans.
Thanks for the comment. Sorry it took so long to approve, the kids had doctors appointments and teeball games.
I think I’ve got a somewhat better perspective because I spent time deep in the wingnut movement. To that end, Steele plays an archetype; his writing allows white conservatives full of racial resentment to live vicarioulsy through it, andd gives cover to white conservative writers who can hedge their writing on race by citing Steele for the substance (George Will does this more than anyone else). It’s good work if you can get it, because the competition is pretty slim, but I imagine it’s rather soul killing, but it doesn’t seem to bother Steele.
I think the tragedy is that Steele really seems to realize what he’s done since Obama got elected. He knows that Obama didn’t benefit from white guilt, Obama only got 2% more of the white vote than Kerry did. He won because it was a Democratic year, and Obama ran the best campaign, particularly in the primaries. Obama might be the first black President, but he got there in a way that explicitly rejected the premise of being someone all about their race, whereas that’s all Steele has ever been. He’s the black guy who writes about how bad affirmative action is. But you can tell from the downright lazy fallacies and lies in this article that his heart just isn’t in it anymore, and I think that’s because, for the first time, Steele realizes that he actually could have been more than that. I mean, the guy has a masters in sociology and a PhD in English, he could have been a very successful public intellectual in the discipline if he hadn’t decided to become a prop for some small level of prominence in the conservative movement.
And how sad for those in the conservative wing of the GOP who actually continue to buy this deeply flawed thesis.
There are a lot of idiots who just can’t face the election loss who now are “proclaiming” that the President will “obviously be a one term President.” Much like Steele, who still insists that Obama now “can’t win.”
The country is moving on from the issue of race. Those that still want to harbor it do so at their political peril. So long as they espouse it, they will continue to look less legitimate in the eyes of the voters.
I agree 100% with your article. it’s depicts Steele so truly.
I’ve been trtyng to make up my mind over who is the “real thing”
Steele or Obama, but have been puzzled with so many contradictions
about “blackness and whiteness”, and it really seems to me that Steele has chosen the wrong path, not because of being conservative, but by being conservative and thinking he was the right thnker for how “blacks” should model their lives. Inferring that his way would make them a more distinctive character and that
Obama Liberalist approach won’t heal them but just pamper and protect tham against the ill-willed.
Summing up, Obama has made it, which only leaves Steel to come up clean and make it known that he has failed in his endeavour to lighten black souls and foremost will have to go back to drawing board to think up a new convincing defence or a kosher counterattack.
Henry Samuels. Spain
[…] consider that people might consider that to be an important issue, is a unique case. It’s vintage Steele, using the fact of the author’s blackness to deliver a scurrilous racial charge that […]