White guilt had no part in vote

Re “Race, post race,” Opinion, Nov. 5

Whatever would I, an over-65 white male supporter of Barack Obama, do without Shelby Steele? Where would I be without his uncanny ability to elucidate my hidden motivations from the vantage point of his ivory tower?

I thought I voted for the 44th president of the United States because he is a man eminently qualified for the job.

Wrong. I did it to assuage the original guilt passed on to me from a racist past.

Charles Hoffman

Encinitas

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Steele points out the conundrum that when the younger generation supports Obama for his “post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation.”

In this, he is guilty of mirror-imaging -- projecting his own feelings onto another group that may not share them.

Young people did not support Obama for his post-racialism, they supported him freely and unequivocally because their imaginations are not dominated by race as Steele’s imagination is. Nor is a non- racial imagination a denial that race is still an issue. Rather, it provides fertile ground for dealing with the problem.

Steele famously predicted that Obama could never win. Unfortunately for him, Obama’s victory has rendered him irrelevant.

Charles Berezin

Los Angeles

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Steele makes a millstone out of a milestone.

Anyone who participated in the multiracial, multiethnic, multi-class effort to elect Obama knows that the campaign was unified by ideas and ideals, not guilty feelings.

While there has always been an element of truth in Steele’s grand discovery of white guilt, he typically follows only this slight strand of the Gordian knot of American race relations.

Steele has made his small, singular idea into an intellectual cottage industry, but it is quite insufficient to explain the triumph of the American community on Nov. 4th.

Bruce L. Anders

Culver City