In 1963, the African-American writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin took issue with Bobby Kennedy’s prediction that a black man would be president within 40 years. Kennedy assumed, he said, that blacks would be ready to “accept and adopt white standards.” Whites, Baldwin argued, thought of themselves as possessing some intrinsic value that black people wanted or needed.
There was a reminder of this on the morning after Obama’s election victory, when conservative black intellectual Shelby Steele argued in the LA Times that Obama’s success lay in his ability to tell white Americans what they want to hear: that racism is no longer a barrier to black advancement. By presenting himself as a screen onto which whites could project their anxieties, Obama offers redemption for America’s original sin of slavery.
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