Free Race Matters by Cornel West

legacy. This represents a fundamental moral crisis of modern American conservatism … American conservatives typically ignored the authoritarian and violent racial-caste practices and values arrayed against black Americans in southern states where the vast majority of blacks live. On the other hand, American conservatives have, throughout this century, often embraced freedom movements elsewhere in the world—in Europe, Latin America, East Asia—but always firmly resisting a proactive embrace of the black American civil rights movement as a bona fide freedom movement fully worthy of their support. So it is in the shadow of this dismal record of mainstream American conservatism vis-à-vis black Americans’ long and arduous quest for equality of status that new black conservatives have emerged.
    MARTIN KILSON, “Anatomy of Black Conservatism” (1992)
    T HE publication of Thomas Sowell’s Race and Economics in 1975 marked the rise of a novel phenomenon in the United States: a visible and aggressive black intellectual conservative assault on traditional black liberal ideas. The promotion of conservative perspectives is not new in African American history. The preeminent black conservative of this century, George S. Schuyler, published a witty and acerbic column in the influential black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier for decades, and his book Black and Conservative is a minor classic in African American letters. Similarly, the reactionary essays (some of which appeared in Readers’ Digest ) and Republican Party allegiance of the most renowned African American woman of letters, Zora Neale Hurston, are often overlooked by her contemporary feminist and womanist followers. Yet Sowell’s book still signified something new—a bid for conservative hegemony in black political and intellectual leadership in the post–Civil Rights era.
    This bid, as yet, has been highly unsuccessful though it has generated much attention from the American media, whose interest is most clearly evident in the hoopla surrounding the recent works of Shelby Steele, Stephen Carter, and Stanley Crouch. The new black conservatism is a response to the crisis of liberalism in Afro-America. This crisis, exemplified partly by the rise of Reaganism and the collapse of left politics, has created an intellectual space that conservative voices of various colors now occupy.
    In this context, the writings of my friend and fellow Christian Glenn Loury warrant attention in that he attempts to distance himself from mainstream conservatism, while targeting his critiques at black liberalism; that is, he is a neo-conservative who wants to dislodge traditional liberalism among black Americans. In his forthcoming book, Free at Last , he puts forward three basic charges against black liberal thinkers. First, he holds that black liberals adhere to a victim-status conception of black people that results in blaming all personal failings of black people on white racism. Second, he claims that black liberals harbor a debilitating loyalty to the race that blinds them to the pathological and dysfunctional aspects of black behavior. Third, Loury argues that black liberals truncate intellectual discourse regarding the plight of poor black people by censoring critical perspectives which air the “dirty linen” of the black community—that is, they dub neo-conservatives like Loury as “Uncle Toms” and thereby fail to take his views seriously in an intellectual manner.
    Loury’s charges are noteworthy in that the hegemony of black liberalism—especially among black academic and political elites—does impose restraints on the quality and scope of black intellectual exchange. Furthermore, the more vulgar forms of black liberalism, for example, extreme environmentalism, tend to downplay or ignore the personal responsibility of black people regarding their behavior toward one another and others.
    Unfortunately, and