Shelby Steele, a former English professor and author of several excellent books on race in America, including White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era, writes a fascinating analysis at The Wall Street Journal of why Jesse Jackson wants to geld Barack Obama.
Steele explains in plausible accents not only Jackson's antipathy for Obama but also Obama's wide cultural appeal among both whites and blacks. Here's a glimpse:
Mr. Obama's great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.
So it is not hard to see why Mr. Jackson might have experienced Mr. Obama's emergence as something of a stiletto in the heart. Mr. Obama is a white "race card" -- moral leverage that whites can use against the moral leverage black leaders have wielded against them for decades. He is the nullification of Jesse Jackson -- the anti-Jackson.
It's an outstanding column and you should waste no time getting to it.
RLC
