Help Me Understand Field Negro's Alleged "Smackdown" of Shelby Steele's WSJ Op-ed

I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Steele's entire article Why The GOP Can't Win With Minorities. What is facinating to me is how the Field Negro responded to it as well as the bloggers over at Jack & Jill Politics who called Field Negroes response a "smackdown". I have been trying to process it from their prospective but I'm getting nowhere. So I have decided to just post what each said and perhaps someone can help me understand what is that I'm missing -- I hate it when I don't "get" it.

Shelby Steele writes: "The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.... What drew me to conservatism years ago was the fact that it gave discipline a slightly higher status than virtue. This meant it could not be subverted by passing notions of the good. It could be above moral vanity. And so it made no special promises to me as a minority. It neglected me in every way except as a human being who wanted freedom. Until my encounter with conservatism I had only known the racial determinism of segregation on the one hand and of white liberalism on the other -- two varieties of white supremacy in which I could only be dependent and inferior."


The Field Negro responds: Right there, Shelby, is the problem with your well written essay. You only saw yourself as a person of color in two ways: "A racial determination of segregation" and the subject of "white" liberal paternalism. You should have said no to both of those choices. It wasn't one or the other. Both were destined to make you the man you became: Someone who chooses a selfish ideology which is predicated on chasing a carrot that you will never be able to grab. By embracing that ideology you have bought into the false premise that your people seek the liberal handout and are not willing to work as hard as the conservative to grab the carrot. It is not true. I submit to you that your people (and poor people of all colors) are willing to work harder. The problem is that their government has never been willing to work as hard for them. Instead, their government has worked only for a special few, and contrary to what you might believe, it didn't neglect you, it used you to achieve its own goals. At least with liberalism, with all its faults, there was a realization that it should make you a promise, and that promise was that never again will you be subjected to second class status, and our government will always work to make it so. Our government will finally give you an even playing field to compete on, after tipping the field against you for so long.

Shelby Steele writes:""So here stands contemporary American conservatism amidst its cultural liabilities and, now, its electoral failures -- with no mechanism to redeem America of its shames, atavistically resisted by minorities, and vulnerable to stigmatization as a bigoted and imperialistic political orientation. Today's liberalism may stand on decades of failed ideas, but it is failure in the name of American redemption. It remains competitive with -- even ascendant over -- conservatism because it addresses America's moral accountability to its past with moral activism. This is the left's great power, and a good part of the reason Barack Obama is now the president of the United States. No matter his failures -- or the fruitlessness of his extravagant and scatter-gun governmental activism -- he redeems America of an ugly past. How does conservatism compete with this?"

The Field Negro writes: "Sorry Shelby, it can't. And I, for one, am glad for that."

I just want to throw my hands up and say -- "Hopeless, let the "brain dead" bury the "brain dead". But Field Negro is an intelligent man and I have mad respect for him. It's nothing new for me to disagree with him as I ALWAYS do. But I just don't understand the point he is making here. Is it just me? Or, is the Field Negro indeed a real life personification of that which Mr. Steele describes in his article?