I am not a fan of Shelby Steele, a prolific African-American author who is politically conservative, as in he doesn't believe in Affirmative Action programs. But I just saw him on C-SPAN at a book signing in Berkeley where his discussion of his recent taut tome about Barack Obama sounds most worthy of in-depth consideration.

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

Excerpts of editorial reviews (italics mine):

In Shelby Steele's beautifully wrought and thoughtprovoking new book, A Bound Man, the award-winning and bestselling author ... attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for the highest office in the land is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America.

Steele writes of how Obama is caught between the two classic postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging. Bargainers strike a "bargain" with white America in which they say, I will not rub America's ugly history of racism in your face if you will not hold my race against me.

Steele maintains that Senator Obama is too constrained by these elaborate politics to find his own true political voice. Obama has the temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail. And yet he is a Promethean figure, a bound man.

Like Obama, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Obama emerges as a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to accept and honor what we honestly feel about race. In A Bound Man, Steele makes clear the precise constellation of forces that bind Senator Obama ...

Want to read the entire review or get the book?

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/105-7493748-7325260?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=a+bound+man&x=0&y=0

Positively,
Carolan