BLACK POLITICS IS NOT MONOLYTHIC

I’ve had many conversations about how the black community is not a monolyth when it comes to political alignment. Most recently, I have a conversation that highlighted the idea that the only way to deal with the issue of racism required voting for liberal political candidates. I took exception.

Specifically, it was said that conservatives are not all racist, but that they don’t see racism as a show-stopper. I posed the idea that black conservatives seem pretty passionate about fighting racism while not agreeing with the idea that liberals are the only way to care about racism. The response that came back was the simile that abused spouses still stick with their abusers implying black republicans are abused by the republicans with which they are affiliated.

This article is about listening to conservative black voices. They do not deny racism exists. They tend to not agree with popular liberal assumptions about institutional racism (some have publically said that they believe the existance of some forms of institutional racism is real but do not believe all racism is institutional and feel it is important to parse the difference.) And they believe that the liberal agenda both historically promoted classic institutional racism and that the modern liberal agenda abuses the issue to exploit black concerns without producing helpful solutions. These conservative black voices tend to promote solutions wrapped in opportunity rather than class-warfare designed to drive angst for election exploitation.

The pattern I have seen the most in my conversations is that a large majority of people who advocate for liberal political class warfare on the issue of racism have not listened to black conservative voices… nearly at all. In fact, the media do not tend to promote them, so yes, like anything worthy of effort you have to be intentional in your search.

The same is generally true of black history. With the exception of a few commonly mentioned black historical figured that support modern liberal talking-points and a list of black names of people who we might deem victims (often rightly so), black conservative voices are not promoted because they do not feed the liberal agenda of race-based class warfare. So those voices are lost to history if you are waiting around for modern media to promote them.

Well, rest assured, they do exist, and in large numbers, and here is a short list of very modern names and links, followed by an even longer list of extremely popular sports figures, politicians, writers, actors, and commentators. Buckle up:

Tyrone Magnus

Jesse Lee Peterson

Deroy Murdock

Syndicated Columnist at The National Review Online

Angela McGlowan

News analyst and author of the book Bamboozled: How americans are being exploited by the lies of the liberal agenda

Shelby Steele

A senior fellow at Standard University who advocates for the black conservative movement

Ward Connerly

The chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute advocating for the undoing of liberal agenda disguised as civil rights advocasy

Project 21

A conservative black think tank

Robert George

Conservative Columnist for the New York Post

Ken Blackwell

Senior Fellow for Human Rights and Constitutional Governance at the Family Research Council

Star Parker

Conservative Syndicated columnist

Lary Elder

Conservative author, columnist, and vloger

Black Republican

The Black Republican blogger

The list goes on and on and on and it should be worth noting I’ve intentionally left out many very recognizable popular black voices. For example:

• Michael Steele
• Condoleezza Rice
• Colin Powell
• Tim Scott
• Clarence Thomas
• Herman Cain
• Candace Owens
• Alan keys
• Ben Carson
• Don King
• Karl Malone
• Stacey Dash
• Sheryl Underwood
• Lynn Swann
• T.D. Jakes
• Jimmie Walker
• Thomas Sowell
• Alveda King
• Amy Holms
• Stephen L. Carter
• Joseph C Phillips
• Dick Parsons
• Carol Miller Swain
• Charles Payne

… and dear glorious heaven the list goes on and on and on. All it takes is searching for conservative black voices to know there is no shortage of brilliant black conservatives. And they are quick to note the following real facts:

• Republicans have always nearly unanimously voted in favor of civil rights while Democrats historical voted against them (in the majority)
• Post civil war Jim Crowe laws were established predominantly by southern Democrat governors
• While Democrats say that there was a large historical “party switch” claiming that Lincoln Republican switched to being Democrats and Democrats switched parties to become the new (racist) Republicans, this is not historical true in the least. As denoted by an indian-american historian, only one Democrat in the post civil-war era became a Republican, and it was because he favored abolition of black slaves in contrast to his Democrat part members.
• The KKK was considered a political action group to suppress the civil rights of black voters and were directly affiliated with historical Democrat party leadership
• The last KKK member to hold political office was a modern Democrat that President Bill Clinton called a “mentor.”
• Political funding of chemical castration of Black citizens (historically in large numbers in both Virginia and California) was advocated for by Democrats and fought against by republicans
• Democats in Congress advocated for forced abortion for black women in New York City and the upper north east of the United States. This was a program instituted by the founders of Planned Parenthood as a part of the Democrat Eugenics agenda. Later the group was renamed Planned Parenthood and it’s Eugenics agenda was removed from it’s history. But the tactics of placing abortion clinics predominantly in black communities continued to this day. It is no longer force abortion, but marketed as “choice”. The history and legacy of “Eugenics” was specifically designed to purify the races (nearly the ideological and political foundation of racism, post civil war, and explained as “progressive science” to the public… their words, not mine.)
• Re-integration in the south was headed up by a Republican president
• In the 1990s the Democrat president Bill Clinton along with the current 2020 Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden who was at that time a Democrat in Congress, promoted the most significant changes to criminal prosecutorial law resulting in the largest trend of mass incarceration of black men in modern America (this is commonly mentioned today and used to promote the idea that Democrat politicians are needed to fix this problem, hiding the fact that modern Democrats created the problem)
• The current Republican US President Donald Trump signed the largest sweeping criminal justice reform bill in history, and that bill was bi-partisan in nature and not crafted by liberals in Congress, proving empirically that modern Republican Congress members and presidents do care about such issues. Conservatives are interested in (and did) solve for the problems Clinton Democrats created.
• Republican President Trump signed police reform executive order following the death of George Floyd, that forces transparency for local police abuse to be aggregated at the federal level so that bad cops could not hide their history and be transfered to other communities. The executive order federally banned chokehold techniques in policing. Of that President Trump publicly stated, “We’re united by our desire to ensure peace and dignity and equality for all Americans.” Liberal media did not promote this story, most likely because it doesn’t fit the current liberal agenda.

I am confident the above conservative black people would feel fully offended if someone stood before them and informed them that either…

1. For as long as they stay conservative, they are like an abused spouse unwilling to leave their abuser, or…
2. They don’t “get” racism, or…
3. Liberal Politicians are the only group trying to solve racism

I believe in fighting racism. I believe I have shown here that historically and in the modern sense conservative politicians are working to solve for problems in ways that match their historical and modern values, even if it doesn’t match the liberal tactics, which can be argued have created more historical harm than good.

I think conservatives just disagree with liberal-minded people on how to actually do that, how much of that is politically solvable at a Federal and State level, and I might disagree with some on what has historically worked and what has historically failed in the fight against racism and how those successes and failures align with Democrat and Republican historical agendas.