Monday during an appearance on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” author and Hoover Institution senior fellow Shelby Steele, creator of the recently released documentary “What Killed Michael Brown?” that debuted last month, reacted to remarks from former President Barack Obama casting aspersions on President Donald Trump’s supporters.
In his forthcoming memoir “A Promised Land,” Obama said Trump’s supporters elected Trump because he offered an “elixir for their racial anxiety.”
Steele told host Laura Ingraham that Obama’s sentiment came out of pressure to take on a “negative attitude” about the country.
“It makes me sad,” he said. “I have never been a fan of Mr. Obama, but this is really, really disappointing. This makes a point: Obama feels a pressure — many Blacks do, we all do, really — that if you don’t really take on a negative attitude toward America, you are somehow inauthentic as a Black person.”
“So, we as Blacks suffer from might be called the angst of inauthenticity,” Steele continued. “And so we do as what you just mention Obama — to identify with victimization as the deep and profound truth of who we are. I can’t imagine a sadder statement. Can you imagine Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, other great leaders saying something like that?”
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