The Obama bargain

Shelby Steele who writes intelligently on almost every subject he touches has written a book about Barack Obama's candidacy. And Steele has a very intelligent column about how race has helped Obama's campaign so far because he has been able to offer whites what Steele calls "racial innocence."

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

And that is why the whole Jeremiah Wright story is so toxic to Obama's appeal. It strikes right at the heart of Obama's appeal to white voters.

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

Perhaps his speech today will be able to restore that racial innocence for many white voters, but I suspect that, like virginal innocence, once it's lost for a candidate, it just is never the same again.

UPDATE: Sorry about double posting the same quote.