Don Wycliff On Shelby Steele On Obama

Well worth a read:

It apparently never occurs to Steele that for a man a generation younger than himself the terms of blackness might be different, that the “totalitarian” demands he encountered in the ’60s might no longer prevail, that Barack Obama’s mixed-race experience might actually be different than Shelby Steele’s.

Steele sounds in this book like a man whose head is full of a music that he alone can hear. It never did become clear to me what he means by the term “a bound man.” But it certainly seems that if anyone is bound, it is Steele himself. He is bound to a set of ideas and theories that he formulated in reaction to his experiences in the 1960s. They once sounded like wisdom, but today they tinkle suspiciously like the bells on a fool’s cap.