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As I tried to show in my post last week on Why Black History Month Still Matters, much of our contemporary discourse has important historic roots. The black conservative intellectual tradition is one example that I think bears some examination. That tradition illuminates the complex ways in which African American thought is intertwined with and simultaneously distinct from other American intellectual traditions. In this post, I want to compare and contrast just a few examples of historical and contemporary black conservative argument.
Of course, it's important to carefully contextualize the thinkers and thought that I'm about to discuss. Regardless of their ideological leanings, I can't say I've come across many black folks meditating on the wisdom of Edmund Burke or other philosophical lions of mainstream conservative thought. Black political thought has largely been concerned with finding a way to end slavery and the differential opportunities of Jim Crow and its aftermath. What I think of as the modern wave of black conservatism dates back to the early 1980s when people such as economist Glenn Loury tried to convince the Urban League to abandon protest politics in favor of character education and free-market solutions to black poverty. Clearly, we are talking about very different periods and priorities.
(By the way, in citing Loury, I mean to use him as an example of a line of thought that gained greater visibility at that time, not as the father of black conservative thought. Others who became prominent at that time include economists Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, and former Civil Rights Commission head Clarence Pendleton, among others.)
That said, there are some lines of thought that still echo today, and are worth noting.
Many modern self-identified black conservatives hearken back to educator Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), the former slave who founded of Tuskegee University and the National Negro Business League, (now known as the National Business League.) One of the wonders of the internet is that Washington's papers are online, and they make for a fascinating read. Shay Riley, who runs the widely read blog Booker Rising, summarizes why many of Washington's contemporary admirers look to him now:
"Inspired by Booker T. Washington's work, this website will promote self-help, education, enterprise, democracy, and society as the seeds for Black America's future. We won the civil rights movement. It's now time for Stage II: further propelling black American success in this increasingly globalized era, via our 'seeds.'"
Washington's widely-acclaimed 1895 speech to the Atlanta Cotton Exposition lays out his "accommodationist" strategy for racial advancement. Instead of trying to defend the citizenship rights accorded to former slaves by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and the Constitution from the advancement of Jim Crow, he said, black Southerners would work alongside whites to build the region's economy:
"The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized."
You can hear Washington reading part of that speech here. It's the only known recording of his voice.
One of Washington's arguments in that speech anticipates a concern expressed by some black writers today who take a conservative position on immigration issues:
"To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race,“Cast down your bucket where you are.” Cast it down among the eight millions of Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your firesides."
In 2007, blogger and political analyst Faye Anderson wrote about African American worries about illegal immigration. She opens with a quote from Frederick Douglass:
"Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant, whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.
- Frederick Douglass (1853)
"For most African Americans, Frederick Douglass was the last good Republican. However, today black Americans are aligned with Republicans again on at least one cause: opposition to illegal immigration.
"Why? Jobs."
Washington's doctrine of racial accommodation
