Award-winning author Steele attests that Senator Barack Obama's groundbreaking quest for the highest office in the land is fast becoming a galvanizing occasion beyond mere presidential politics, one that is forcing a national dialogue on the current state of race relations in America. Says Steele, poverty and inequality usually are the focus of such dialogues, but Obama's bid for so high an office pushes the conversation to a more abstract level where race is a politics of guilt and innocence generated by our painful racial history--a kind of morality play between (and within) the races in which innocence is power and guilt is impotence. Steele maintains that Obama is caught between the two classic postures that blacks have always used to make their way in the white American mainstream: bargaining and challenging; and proposes a way for him to break these bonds and find his own voice.--From publisher description.