The power of black conservatives

Black conservatism is a particular form of conservative politics. As a movement, it’s American, with strengthening echoes in the UK, in France and beyond. Some of its most prominent activists would be classed, and class themselves, as straight-down-the-line conservatives. Some, such as Glenn Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, confess to being, as Irving Kristol’s neoconservative quip has it, ‘liberals mugged by reality.’

All would say of themselves that they are Americans first, patriots, proud of being and glad to be so, dismissive of the radical critique of their country, and harsh on black personalities and protestors who they believe parade a status of subjugation which they have not earned.

Black conservatives feel as much part of western culture as any white: Loury underscored that in a recent speech in Florida, to loud applause from his conservative listeners, as he said: ‘Tolstoy is mine, Dickens is mine, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein are mine!’

For black role models, they look to the escaped slaves and abolitionist activists Frederick Douglas and Harriet Tubman, and the Baptist pastor Martin Luther King – all of whom argued for equality and integration in American society.

Black Americans support politicians from the party which supports them: that had been, since the ending of slavery, the Republicans, Lincoln’s party. When, in fits and starts, northern-based Democrats began to find the aggressive bigotry of many of their southern co-members increasingly embarrassing in the post-war years, then younger generations of blacks, finding support for advancement in local, state and federal politics from Democrats, emerged as figures of increasing power in the once-despised party.

The black conservative strain, however, did not disappear. It had been powerfully expressed by Booker T Washington, born in slavery in 1856, seven years before Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation, and nine years before the 13th Amendment to the Constitution made slavery illegal. Booker T built support for programmes which stressed ‘industry, thrift, intelligence and property’ as the surest qualities to gain genuine equality, civil rights and respect.

But as black politics came in the sixties to be defined, especially in the media, by radicals, as the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, the conservatives became increasingly fearful that radicalism and separatism would cement a black identity around a rejection of patriotism, capitalism and constitutionalism. At the same time, a younger generation of white as well as black liberals and radicals were beginning to believe that, in the words of Christopher Lasch, ‘a common tradition, or a common civic language or a set of common standards (are) …necessarily and unavoidably racist.’

The problem which has beset black conservatives, and does so still, is: what of the American history of black-white relations do they wish to conserve? Michael Ondaatje, a rare student of the movement, referred, in his Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America, to the Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin’s contemptuous response to the phenomenon of Booker T, then at the height of his influence as an occasional adviser to President Theodore Roosevelt in the first years of the 20^th century. The Russian saw a conservative as someone who ‘is satisfied with existing conditions and advocates their continuance’, thus Booker T’s approach ludicrous: ‘a contradiction in terms, a freak of nature.’ Who could reasonably advocate ‘the continuance of second class citizenship’?

The answer, in its briefest form, was Thomas Sowell – a polymathic scholar from an indigent background and now, at 91, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. In December 1980, long after sloughing off his young man’s Marxism, he addressed a conference of fellow black intellectuals at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, a gathering encouraged by aides to Ronald Reagan, then president-elect, whose election to the presidency the scholars supported.

Reagan’s coming, Sowell said, was ‘a historic opportunity’ to end and reverse social policies which, though ‘noble’ in intent, were showing themselves as counterproductive – in making the black recipients of subsidies, special treatment and quotas dependent on the state, and not on their own actions: the civil rights legislation of the sixties had freed black Americans not to hook themselves to public assistance but to ‘confront economic realities and to achieve self-development, in the schools, at work, in our communities.’ Sowell, implicitly addressing Kropotkin’s scorn, also observed that ‘those who are called black conservatives are certainly not interested in preserving the status quo…still less are they seeking to return to the status quo ante, the Jim Crow era.’

The movement was rooted in academia, and remains largely there: but it includes journalists, as Jason L Riley, Sowell’s biographer: his (white) wife, Naomi Riley was fired in 2012 from her column in the Chronicle of Higher Education for arguing for the elimination of Black Studies in universities. In 2014, he published ‘Please Stop Helping Us’, arguing that the Great Society initiatives of the Lyndon Johnson presidency hurt more than helped – ‘in practice they have slowed the self development that proved necessary for other groups to advance’.

The writer Thomas Chatterton Williams drafted the open letter, signed by 153 writers and intellectuals published by Harpers magazine in July 2020, criticising the increasing ‘intolerance of opposing views’; his 2019 Self Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race seeks to transcend the designation of black (he is mixed race) – saying in an interview that ‘unlearning race for black people is more along the lines of seriously saying blackness isn’t real, race isn’t real.’

In show business, Candace Owens, a talk show host, has said of Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, that her allegations of the racism she suffered is evidence of ‘a typical leftist narcissist’, and described the supporters of Black Lives Matter as a ‘bunch of whining toddlers pretending to be oppressed for attention.’

The rapper Kanye West, who had a much-publicised meeting with Donald Trump, whom he praised as ‘an outsider’ breaking into the closed shop of normal politics, has said that rather than putting Harriet Tubman on a $20 dollar bill, it should have been Michael Jackson – ‘It’s like when you see all the slave movies. Why you gotta keep reminding us about slavery?’ West said he would run for the presidency in 2020 (he appeared on the ballot in 12 states, gaining only 60,000 votes) – on a ticket of addressing police violence, but also of black self-help, unencumbered by persistent references to a bleak past.

All these black conservatives, like the radicals, blame whites: not for racism as commonly defined, but for a condescending concern which assumes that blacks are unable to work, learn and succeed as whites (and other ethnic groups) do, without quotas, or subsidies, or lowered targets of achievement.

The black Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter, in his Woke Racism, speaks of ‘Third Wave Anti-Racism’ as a ‘religion’ which has produced an ‘Elect’, fundamentalists who name and shame and dismiss ‘heretics’ who have transgressed the faith and who regard themselves as the bearers of a truth before which all must bow (at times literally).

This ‘truth’ is that, as he writes, ‘black people are unheard, unseen, that America never comes to terms with race… to these people, progress on race is not something to celebrate but to talk around. This is because, with progress, the Elect lose their sense of purpose.’

Loury and McWhorter have frequent conversations on Loury’s regular podcast: among their most consistent themes is that liberals dismiss the effect of the civil rights acts passed, in the Johnson administration, in the sixties – insisting that a shift the conservatives regard as a move to a new era has meant little or no change. They like to mock liberal excesses – as, recently, the case of Jussie Smollett, a black, gay actor in the popular Fox show Empire, who reported to police that he had been beaten up by two white men who had poured bleach over him, hung a noose around his neck and shouted ‘Make America Great Again’. The whole incident turned out to be a clumsily staged attempt to attract sympathy as a celebrity victim of ‘white racist violence’.

Loury’s podcast interviews are examples of what he, and others in the black conservative pantheon, call for: debate which is debate, not with one finger on the cancel button should one of the participants stumble into a current forbidden zone. He is presently, with the aid of experts, examining why there has been a huge spike in crime and murders – 535 in 2021 – in Philadelphia, where demands to abolish prisons and de-fund police are still being pursued, and a progressive prosecutor, Larry Krasner, has denied that there is a ‘crisis of violence’. Loury ran a highly critical piece on Krasner by the conservative commentator Rav Arora – but in the next issue, ran a lengthy critique of Arora’s approach.

Smollett’s white violence prank was a dismal finale to a year in which race continued to divide Americans, and ‘woke’ positions on race continued to expand their scope and power. That underscored the black conservatives’ conviction that thoughtless, virtue-signalling white liberalism was creating a market for self-serving displays of black oppression. It’s a difficult point to argue against. Black people on the right know they are right. Given a wider audience, their numbers might grow.