There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wa… - Shelby Steele
" "There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a racial identity as politicized and demanding as today's black identity. This identity wants to take over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective truth—its defining ideas of grievance and protest—become personal truth.... These are the identity pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a transparent black identity much of his life. He needs to 'be black.' And this hunger—no matter how understandable it may be—means that he is not in a position to reject the political liberalism inherent in his racial identity. For Obama liberalism is blackness.
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About Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele (born 1 January 1946) is an American conservative writer and a fellow of the Hoover Institution. His columns and op-eds have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Harper's Magazine. In 1991 he won an Emmy, a Writers Guild award, and a San Francisco Film Festival award for his documentary, Seven Days in Bensonhurst. In 2004 he was awarded the National Humanities Medal.
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At every turn "world opinion," like a schoolmarm, takes offense and condemns Israel for yet another infraction of the world's moral sensibility. And this voice has achieved an international political legitimacy so that even the silliest condemnation of Israel is an opportunity for self-congratulation.<p>Rock bands now find moral imprimatur in canceling their summer tour stops in Israel (Elvis Costello, the Pixies, the Gorillaz, the Klaxons). A demonstrator at an anti-Israel rally in New York carries a sign depicting the skull and crossbones drawn over the word "Israel." White House correspondent Helen Thomas, in one of the ugliest incarnations of this voice, calls on Jews to move back to Poland. And of course the United Nations and other international organizations smugly pass one condemnatory resolution after another against Israel while the Obama administration either joins in or demurs with a wink.
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