Shelby Steele is feeling frisky. I’m not really sure what causes people like Steele to contradict themselves so violently, and to offer critiques of others that are more likely to be leveled at themselves. From my Undercover Brother:

That’s right, people. Shelby Steele, a black man of supposed high intellect, declared – on national TV! – that Hillary is “blacker than Barack Obama.”

He said it Friday afternoon on MSNBC’s “Hardball.” He was a guest alongside Michael Eric Dyson.

You know I got that audio. You know that, right? Click here. The clip begins with Prof. Dyson talking about the impact of Oprah Winfrey’s support of Sen. Obama.

If that sounds odd, it might be because Steele has previously described such rigid conceptions of negritude as “totalitarian”.

We entered an era of bad faith where we began to look to our identity to get us ahead… You notice that blackness, the black identity never came about until we were free… then all of a sudden Stokely Carmichael used that phrase “Black Power”, and then all of a sudden there was a focus on black-ness, we were going to get together as a group, we were going to move ahead that way out of our identity.

Well, now I’ve come to realize that almost every oppressed group that comes into freedom does this, they’re shocked, humiliated by it, they then form an identity that is much more intense, that is in fact totalitarian, that demands that you not only be black but that you be black in a certain way, that you make your bond with the group and that you put that identity abouve your individuality. But, we’d just got free!

Having that same “you’re not black” card pulled on Steele all his life has led him to pen book after book lamenting the way his blackness is constantly questioned because of something as arbitrary as his political identity. It hasn’t however, discouraged him from pulling that same card on others when politically convenient.

Case in point, this comment on a Youtube video of Steele on Hannity:

What the f*** is this red indian talking about?

Is this really the kind of political discourse Steele wants to have?

I quote Nas:

we can’t see ourselves as the boss
Deep-rooted through slavery, self-hatred
The Jewish stick together, friends in high places
We on some low level shit
We don’t want niggaz to ever win


Andrew Young, Shelby Steele, Nas is talking about you.

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