Today on Uncommon Knowledge, the third segment of my interview with Shelby Steele, author of A Bound Man: Why We’re Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.

Writing about Obama in a recent issue of Slate, I note, Chritopher Hitchens makes the following mordant observation:

“Sen. Obama is a congregant of a church in Chicago called Trinity United Church of Christ….Run by the sort of character that the press often guardedly describes as “flamboyant”—a man calling himself the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—this bizarre outfit describes itself as “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” and speaks of “a chosen people” whose nature we are allowed to assume is “Afrocentric.” Trinity United sells creationist books and its home page includes a graphic link to a thing called Goodsearch—the name is surmounted with a halo in its logo—which announces cheerily that “Every time you search or shop online! Our Church earns money.”…Nobody who wants to be taken seriously can possibly be associated with such a substandard and shade-oriented place.

To which Shelby Steel replies that the only way Barack Obama can achieve “authenticity” as a black man is through “a thousand little self-betrayals.”

You you go to that church and you turn a blind eye to the fact that…that it subscribes to an ideology that would exclude the loving family and parents [Obama was raised by his white mother and white grandparents] that you had….You get used to self-betrayal as a survival mechanism.