A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win

In this fascinating book, African-American columnist and thinker Shelby Steele looks at presidential candidate Barack Obama. Analyzing Obama's family life and life experiences, Dr. Steele attempts to place him within the framework of modern African-American culture, particularly in light of the "masks" that African-Americans have had to "wear" within the American context of white racism and oppression. Dr. Steele believes that Senator Obama has risen far by his uniquely capable use of the "mask of the bargainer," making whites feel good about themselves and receiving gratitude in return. But, can a man wear this "mask" and rise to the very summit of political power in the United States? Overall, I found this to be an utterly fascinating book. I found Dr. Steele's revealing of the African-American use of masks to survive and hopefully prosper within the framework of the American racial hierarchy, which was often viciously enforced, to be quite enlightening. Indeed, it put a lot of what I knew and have seen in modern American events into context. Now, is Dr. Steele's belief that Barack Obama cannot win correct? I suppose only time will tell. At this point, it does appear that his popularity within the mainstream left of the Democratic Party has given him more room for maneuver than Dr. Steele thought. As such, his chances for hearing Hail To The Chief played in his honor are still quite strong. As I said, only time will tell. But, even if that part of the book is incorrect, I think that Dr. Steele's explanation of race relations in the United States is penetrating and highly revealing. I highly recommend this book to any interested in truly understanding the United States today.

When Barack Obama first showed up on the scene I couldn't figure out why, for such a young guy, his speeches always sound like nineteen sixties civil rights reflections. Like he's leading some imaginary group of people out of the 'Jim Crow' era. That question was answered when Jeremiah Wright hit the scene with his, 'Black Liberation Theology', nonsense. People like Jeremiah Wright can't let go of something as juicy as the 'Crow' era. 'A Bound Man', presents an explaination for the development of Obama's mindset involving racism in America and his rise in popularity among blacks as well as whites. The book also presents the evolution in race relations that has taken place in America. I think Shelby Steele might be on to something. I read this book in one sitting. Highly recommend.

Shelby Steele's book The Bound Man does a convincing job of detailing the bind that Barack Obama finds himself in as he runs for president. Steele views Obama as the most promising black candidate to ever run for president in U.S. history, certainly someone with more winning potential than prior black candidates such as Jessie Jackson in 1984 and Al Sharpton in 2004. Indeed, Steele argues Obama is distinguished from other black candidates because he chooses not to capitalize on race but instead he runs as an everyman who represents the fervent hope of the greater American public that blacks and whites can finally come together. Obama's biracial heritage also brands him as unique compared to prior black candidates running for president. His mother who raised him is a white woman from Kansas so Obama is intimately familiar and comfortable in the world of whites. Raised by his Midwestern mother, grandmother and grandfather - all white - he was essentially raised exclusively in a white family first in Hawaii and later in Indonesia. On the other hand, his black Kenyan father who separated from his mother when Obama was two (they later divorced) left Barack Obama with a feeling of disconnection that has motivated a life-long quest to come to terms with his black roots. Steele insists that Obama's choice to work in community agencies in East St. Louis out of college as well as his decision to do civil rights law on the south side of Chicago after graduating from Harvard Law School are both examples of his efforts to come to terms with his black past and black identity. Steele also makes the point that Obama is not someone who has gotten where he is through Affirmative Action and other entitlement programs. From early on when living in Indonesia where he spent his adolescence, his mother would get him up at 4:30 to go over lesson plans so he had the best education possible. At Harvard Law School, Obama also headed up the Harvard Law Review which is considered the pinnacle of success at that school and this was achieved solely through his own efforts and ability. So Obama represents a biracial black man who has become eminently successful through his hard work, intelligence and obvious charisma. The bind that Steele believes Obama finds himself in is twofold. As an individual he struggles with a biracial identity which makes it difficult for him to feel fully at home in the world of whites or in the world of blacks. He is always the consummate outsider - a role that Steele identifies with as he is also a man who also grew up with a white mother and black father and has been a senior researcher at the very conservative, largely white think tank, the Hoover Institute at Stanford University since 1994. But this individual bind pales in comparison to the larger societal bind Obama finds himself in. Steele argues convincingly that all blacks who achieve visibility in our culture do so by wearing certain masks. Since the post sixties, many

Once again, Shelby Steele has written an embarrassingly honest book, one certain to alienate those dunces of our age, black, white, or mixed race, who find themselves, in fact, comfortably at home with the current, sad state of racial affairs in America. Steele tears away the veils of "polite" convention, exposing the leftover 60's postures of grievance industry blacks who thrive on separatist group thinking and reassuring, if exaggerated, ideas of continuing victimization; the questionable hunger of whites who value affirmations of their own racial innocence more than they do the integrity of individual character or institutions; and the oscillations of mixed race persons, now eager to demonstrate their "blackness," just as an earlier generation of masochistic screen heroines of mixed race sought "to pass as white." Steele charges that none of these wholly conventional persons will admit an obvious truth, a truth by common consent never even mentioned, that - given the removal since the Civil Rights Movement of the major impediments to black success erected in earlier eras - black personal responsibility is today the principal key to black uplift and a new future for all Americans. Mentioning such a truth would be political suicide for any candidate like Obama, heavily dependent as he is on both black and white votes. Blacks would interpret his words as those, according to current standards, of someone "not black enough." Whites would resent his failure to play the expected, ingratiating reassurer granting them desired freedom from the stigma of the racist past. Further, Steele sees the attractive Obama himself as just one more wholly conventional man rather than in any sense "a revolutionary or a genuine reformer," one unfortunately "bound" by seeking merely to appease through words the expectations of both of his equally smug, conventional constituencies, and thus destined not to adequately please either. Were Obama to choose the honorable way out, the path of honest directness and authenticity of character, in the recent fashion of, say, Bill Cosby, he'd surely advance the cause of the Good, though he'd be even more certain to lose favor with today's close-minded electorate. Either way, he becomes the titular "bound man" of Steele's latest eye-opening volume. Steele is a genuine disturber of complacency, and, as such, I expect he will receive no friendlier a welcome than his type is historically accorded. While it's true that today he wouldn't be offered a cup of hemlock, his views, following our current fashion, will most likely just be wholly ignored by those movers and shakers who need most to take them seriously and put them into action.