I'm watching the Shelby Steele talk now. He's already been proven wrong in his (in my opinion, rather childish) thesis. He has postulated that Edwards has a better chance of getting elected because, since he's not a "bound" Black American, he can tell us what he really thinks, and so we know what we're getting with him, and that since Obama is what he calls a "negotiator" and is therefore "bound", we can't really know what he thinks, and if Obama ever tells us what he thinks, we won't vote for him.

Two of the many things that are wrong with this... Obama is still in the race. Edwards isn't. So we know that Edwards is not as electable as Obama, and secondly, we now know a lot more about what Obama really thinks about things than we did when Mr. Steele gave his talk, and every time Obama tells us what he thinks, his poll numbers go up. One example of this is Steel's assertion that when Bill Cosby said he thinks Blacks should take more responsibility for their advancement, White people turned against him, but Obama said essentially the same thing in his speech about Reverend Wright, and yet his poll numbers when up after the speech.

Ironically, Mr. Steel, if we are to accept his thesis about the two kinds of Blacks, is the ultimate example of the kind he's calling "the negotiator", telling us Whites all the secrets of the way Black people, according to him, think about their place relation to Whites. If what he says about negotiators is true, we don't really have any reason to accept what he says as being true. He has sewn the seeds of his own discrediting.