I can’t believe I am writing this. But I am. Shelby Steele is right. Not in the conclusions expressed in his recent article in the Wall Street Journal about Judge Sonia Sotomayor and what her nomination reveals about President Obama’s supposed contradictions. That is the stuff of fantasy.

But Steele is right about one thing: That to win the White House, Obama and his surrogates had to downplay the significance of his race in order to garner the support of fellow white citizens while subtly appealing to traditional forms of black identity politics. 

Obama’s presidency has led some to believe that we have turned a corner in matters of race; Steele sees only a sophisticated calibration. For him, Obama’s nomination of Sotomayor betrays the lie that much has changed in the nation: He, like us, remains “a captive of America’s ongoing racial neurosis.”

We need not accept Steele’s conservatism to embrace the insight. Race matters abound. Many find it difficult to talk about them and find it even more difficult to generate policy to respond to the nettlesome racial problems that continue to confound the nation. What we are witnessing, even as we revel in the historic significance of Obama’s presidency, is a deepening of our national pathology—a scandalous silence about the various ways racism continues to impact the lives of many of our fellow citizens—as some seek to “get shut,” as Ralph Ellison would say, of blackness. When, for example, conservative opponents of Sotomayor derisively speak of her nomination as the latest instance of bad identity politics, they in effect proclaim that race and gender do not substantively matter in our public deliberations.

Of course they do. We all come from somewhere and are shaped by the traditions and historical events that inform our beliefs and actions. To deny this is to deny a crucial dimension of who we are. But conservative critics often take cover behind the very fact of Obama’s presidency—a fact which implies, at least for some, that America has put aside old racial antagonisms and that any gesture, word or deed which suggests otherwise must be soundly rejected. The price of Obama’s election, a price he indeed paid, is that race can no longer be so easily, as if it ever was, invoked in public conversation about national policy. I say this not to deny the significance of gender and class. Hillary Clinton would have faced similar problems around gender inequality if she would have won. And no politician, these days at least, can talk seriously in public about the poor; poor people, no matter their color, are simply out of bounds.