I don't think you are correct here. He said, more or less, they're afraid of me and I'm on their side; I can imagine they would be even more afraid of you.
I think he was trying to be polite and agreeable, to a fault perhaps. And what he meant was that white people have a preconceived political image of blacks, a feeling that they are opposed ideologically.
I don’t understand the context of “and I’m on your side” applied to the “afraid OF you” interpretation.
People who are literally afraid of blacks aren’t afraid because the blacks disagree with them about issues, they are afraid that the black is going to mug or kill them.
In the realm of politics, the big fear whites have with blacks is that the white will say something “wrong”, and get accused of racism.
I simply cannot believe that, at the political meetings Steele attends, there are republicans who are physically afraid of him — he’s not that scary a guy to begin with, and we’ve long since got past where educated people are generically afraid of blacks — even though they might well be afraid of blacks in CONTEXT, like walking down a street at night. Remember that Jesse Jackson said HE was afraid of seeing black people on the street at night, so that seems a non-racist, well-founded fear.
Anyway, that’s my interpretation. Maybe the point is that his statement makes no sense, and I’m trying to put it in a context that would make sense, but maybe he was just being ignorant.
Maybe he can’t believe that people don’t like what he’s doing, so he’s projecting that they are just “afraid of black people”. In which case, that’s a really good reason to remove him as RNC chair.
We are having a real problem finding a person to take the RNC chair that actually works well. First Martinez, now Steele. Maybe now that McDonnell has won his election, we could get Ed Gillespie. :-)