Eli Steele offers his deep thoughts on our post-racial future:
The day will arrive when this interracial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America’s divisive identity politics. Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end these politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.Identity politics have made racial identity a social currency, rewarded by preferences in college admissions, government contracts and employment. Jack and June have the bloodlines to win preferences. But if they do, they enter into a world where no choice is clean-cut. Do they join the black, Jewish or Latino organizations — or all of them? Do they publicly cultivate one racial identity while privately living free of such categories with family and friends? Or do they come to the conclusion that identity politics cannot offer anything but the pretense of racial purity?
Eli Steele, if you don’t recognize the surname, is the son of Shelby Steele, the conservative race commentator who wrote the hilariously wrong (at the time and in retrospect) book A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win. For the elder Steele’s main conceit is that “identity politics” –the idea that minorities should organized in their own self-interest —
