Shelby Steele quotes
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.
Shelby Steele
[T]he left, whose existence is threatened by the diminishment of racial oppression. The left's unspoken terror is that racism is no longer menacing enough to support its own power. The great crisis for the left today-the source of its angst and hatefulness-is its own encroaching obsolescence. Today the left looks to be slowly dying from lack of racial menace.
Shelby Steele