Black Conservatism as a Reaction to the Failures of the Civil Rights Movement

Discussion

Charles McKelvey:

"In my work in writing my Substack commentaries, I have come across various black conservative thinkers, whose work I have discussed in various posts. John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, for example, has criticized the anti-racist ideology of Ibram Kendi for assuming that all racial inequalities are due to racism, when in fact certain cultural tendencies in black society are explanatory factors, as is evident from a vantage point of common-sense intelligence. Adolph Reed Jr., professor emeritus of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, also has written against race-reductionist arguments, maintaining that they obscure the true and far more complex sources of socioeconomic inequalities. Reed has maintained that race reductionist arguments persist, in spite of their inadequacy, because the new antiracist ideology is the product of an anti-leftist politics that promotes the interests of the black professional/managerial class.

Similarly, Shelby Steele, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has argued that blacks have put themselves forward as continued victims in order to obtain concessions to black demands, thus turning themselves into perpetual victims trading on their victimization. He writes that this process converts “black suffering into a moral power to be wielded, rather than a condition to be overcome. This is the power that blacks discovered in the ’60s. It gained us a War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, public housing and so on. But it also seduced us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on. After all, in an indifferent world, it may feel better to be the victim of a great historical injustice than a person left out of history when that injustice recedes.” Although politically and psychologically useful, the victimization posture is out of sync with reality. Writing before the emission of Executive Orders eliminating DEI by Donald Trump, Steel wrote that “we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. . .. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination.” The victim-focused identity is an anachronism.

Robert Woodson has been a long-time critic of the post-1965 civil rights organizations. He has maintained that they seek funds from the white establishment, ostensibly for the purpose of improving black social and economic conditions; but the strategy functions above all to promote the expansion of a professional class of race specialists. He has written of a race-grievance industry with specialists who have an interest in exaggerating social problems, in order to justify funds. And they have an interest in the perpetuation of social problems in the black community, in order to maintain the need for their brand of race specialists. Therefore, the race specialists, not having an interest in the uplift of the poor, have paid insufficient attention to the education of poor black people with respect to the practical skills, attitudes, and discipline that they need to improve their condition.

Woodson, who during the 1970s directed the Urban League’s Administration of Justice Division, founded in 1981 the Woodson Center, which seeks to help residents of low-income neighborhoods to address their problems. In response to the “1619 Project” of The New York Times, the Woodson Center established “1776 United.” Its mission statement declares: “We dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life.” The program of 1776 United rejects the use of racism as a catch-all explanation for black problems; it advocates alliances between blacks and whites and others in resolving American social problems.

John McWhorter, mentioned above, also criticized the 1619 Project. He maintained that the project was the result of the self-doubt and insecurity of the black intelligentsia, and it made them feel self-important. He wrote that the project is “a kind of performance art,” in which facts are less important than attitude. The project is “all about personality, a certain persona that all are encouraged to adopt as a modern version of being a civil rights warrior. For this 2.0 version of a civil rights warrior, authentic blackness, significant blackness, requires eternal opposition, bitter indignation, and claims of being owed.” Whether or not this posture can change reality is of secondary concern. The important thing is that all of this be expressed, giving rise to “a caste among the oppressed who, in all sincerity, mistake performance for activism.”

For Woodson, the rich history of black achievement is being glossed over in exchange for a permanent sense of grievance. Black achievement in the past was based on values like family, faith, education, entrepreneurship, hard work, patience, and perseverance. For decades after emancipation, the strong social fabric of black institutions like families, churches, schools, and other social institutions provided the support that individuals needed to achieve. What undermines black achievement today is not systemic racism but the erosion of black mediating institutions and the assault on the values that are the key to success.

Woodson was one of three guests on a Heritage Foundation program on “The Black Experience in America” in July 2022. He maintained that in the period of segregation between the Civil War and the 1960s, African Americans had important achievements in education, employment, and income, and they built strong neighborhoods characterized by family stability, active churches, and street safety. These achievements were attained despite patterns of segregation, discrimination, and the denial of political and civil rights. They were attained on a foundation of determination to succeed combined with the institutional support of family and church.

Woodson reported that he never heard a gun fired when he was growing up in a low-income black neighborhood in Philadelphia in the 1940s and 1950s. At that time, 98% of households had a man and woman present raising children. He never heard of an elderly person being mugged in the neighborhood; and he never heard of a child being shot. Black Americans had the highest marriage rate of any sector of American society. Elderly people could walk safely in black neighborhoods. All this at a time when racism was enshrined in law.

Woodson noted that, although African Americans thrived in the period of segregation, the greatest declines have come in the subsequent period of desegregation. The reduction in black poverty during the 1940s and 1950s came to a halt in the 1960s with the War on Poverty, when there was a dramatic change in the composition of families. One hundred years of segregation did not destroy black families, but in the last fifty years, black families have rapidly deteriorated.

In support of this observation, Woodson quoted Thomas Sowell, who had written that the black poverty rate fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960. In 1960, 78% of black children were raised in two-parent families; but by 1990, 30 years after the creation of the liberal welfare state, 66% of black children were raised by a single parent.

In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, as the wave of passion with respect to police conduct unfolded, there were principled black scholars who challenged the prevailing rhetoric. One was Glenn Loury, Professor of Economics at Brown University. In a February 10, 2021, article in Quillette, “Unspeakable Truths about Racial Inequality in America,” Loury writes:

There are about 1,200 fatal shootings of people by the police in the US each year, according to the carefully documented database kept by the Washington Post which enumerates, as best it can determine, every single instance of a fatal police shooting. Roughly 300 of those killed are African Americans, about one-fourth, while blacks are about 13 percent of the population. So that’s an over-representation, though still far less than a majority of the people who are killed. More whites than blacks are killed by police in the country every year. You wouldn’t know that from the activists’ rhetoric.

Loury observes that the killing of 1200 people per year is too many, so this is an issue that ought to be analyzed and discussed.

- “Still, we need to bear in mind that this is a country of more than 300 million people with scores of concentrated urban areas where police interact with citizens. Tens of thousands of arrests occur daily in the United States. So, these events—which are extremely regrettable and often do not reflect well on the police—are, nevertheless, quite rare.”

Seeking to further put the issue of police killing of blacks in a larger context, Loury notes that

- "there are about 17,000 homicides in the United States every year, nearly half of which involve black perpetrators. The vast majority of those have other blacks as victims. For every black killed by the police, more than 25 other black people meet their end because of homicides committed by other blacks. This is not to ignore the significance of holding police accountable for how they exercise their power vis-à-vis citizens. It is merely to notice how very easy it is to overstate the significance and the extent of this phenomenon, precisely as the Black Lives Matter activists have done."

...

We have looked at Kendal Qualls and TakeCharge, placing its call for black revival and restoration alongside the critiques of the prevailing tendencies of black leaders and activists that have been put forth by conservative black intellectuals. Such black conservative voices imply the real possibility for the emergence of a new leadership in black society, which moves away from a black-middle-class discourse that is allied with the elite and the urban upper middle class, that returns to the principles and concepts of the African-American movement of 1919-1972 and 1983-1988, and that casts its fate with the hopes of the majority of the people of the United States in the renewal of the American Republic. Such a return to the source in black society could strengthen the MAGA coalition and enable the consolidation of the MAGA movement as the reigning political paradigm of the next decades."

(https://charlesmckelvey.substack.com/p/the-voice-of-black-conservatives)