Why Race Still Hurts the Right

Fellow True/Slant label mate Conor Friedersdorf, riffing off Charles Blow’s op-ed about the lack of diversity at the tea parties, feels like the right is getting an unfair shake when it comes to dealing with race:

It’s this kind of piece that causes people on the right to think that on matters of race, they’re damned if they do, and they’re damned if they don’t — if they don’t make efforts to include non-whites they’re unenlightened propagators of privilege, and if they do make those efforts they’re the cynical managers of a minstrel show, but either way, race is used as a cudgel to discredit them in a way that would never be applied to a political movement on the left.

I understand why Conor would be frustrated by this type of thing. I don’t know him personally, but any honest reading of his work would lead one to the conclusion that he’s a truly principled conservative who is open to diversity because he finds real value in it both as a concept and a reality, rather than paying it lip service because it’s a cultural buzzword.

That said, I think Conor is missing the point. In responding to Conor’s post, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes:

The sense among some white liberals that they were “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” was part of the work. The sense among some blacks that white liberals didn’t actually get it, and were just rebelling against Daddy, (or some such) was part of the work. In a modern context, many of us who supported Obama thought that Bill Clinton’s Jesse Jackson riff was appalling and low. And many of us who supported Hillary thought that, while liberals had an eye out for any whiff of racism, sexism was basically yawned at.

And yet through it all, blacks have allied themselves, in the main, with liberals. They haven’t done this because they support the entire liberal agenda, or because they think liberalism is an implicit cure-all for racism. They’ve done it because because reconciling the country to its own diversity is at the core of modern liberalism–it’s the foundation to the house, not the paint-job. This is about history. Lyndon Johnson didn’t simply look for black people to window-dress existing policy, he expanded existing policy in a way that showed a policy commitment–at great political cost–to healing the country’s oldest wound, and, in the process, he purged the party of people who had vested interest in jabbing at the wound.

I understand that Conor is talking about something slightly different–the negative effect of what he sees as bad faith criticism of any right-wing efforts to diversify. But the point I’m making is that diversity–for lack of a better word–is a long-term, ongoing process, one that rarely includes merit badges from your friends or foes.

This is the central point and I’m surprised that Conor seems to have either disregarded or overlooked it. One reason liberals often get the benefit of the doubt from African-Americans is that, as TNC points out, when the time came to put the cards on the table and show your hand, LBJ and other Democrats of the Civil Rights era laid it all down in service of extending rights to a group that had been historically denied them. You may say it was cynical or that it was merely politics, but what matters is that they actually did something to advance what they saw as a greater good and a moral obligation. The party fractured in the wake of those battles and the racial resentments borne out of them eventually helped to form the backbone of the modern conservative movement, with those Dixiecrats eventually becoming Republicans dedicated to preserving “state’s rights” and the like.

Of course, the problem for young, modern-day conservatives like Conor is that they are continually lumped in with the Tea Party crowd, who, as the now famous (infamous?) New York Times/CBS News poll are whiter, more wealthy and better educated than the general public. To a certain extent, these people are the sons and daughters of the Southerners who fought, and largely lost, those Civil Rights battles in the 1960s and now those same people are the head and face of the GOP and the conservative movement.

It’s not going to be easy for conservatives to change the perception that they hold retrograde views on race when the governor of Virginia, a self-described moderate, decides to celebrate a “Confederate History Month” and not mention slavery. You’re not going to win black voters by having former Congressmen speaking at Tea Party rallies saying that the president should be sent back to his “home land” of Kenya. Minority voters aren’t going to flock to your banner when Asian-American representatives have threatening faxes sent to their office. And you certainly aren’t going to win a lot of minority votes when you oppose policies that would enfranchise a city with a large black voting population.

So is race a cudgel used against the right? Maybe, though conservatives would do well to figure out that sometimes they’re swinging that club against themselves.

P.S.: I also disagree with Conor that race isn’t used to discredit the left. Of course it is. That liberals are beholden to, or exploit, groups like the NAACP, or black people more generally, has been a central plank of the racial grievance politics that some on the right have engaged in for years. Conservatives often wonder aloud about the ways they can engage a certain strain of black conservatism that has long been on display. One way would be to do the work of actually building bridges to the community, not trotting out Juan Williams, J.C. Watts and Thomas Sowell in an effort to show that you’re “diverse”. I wouldn’t call these men “minstrels”, as I suspect Charles Blow would, but in a political movement that is largely made up of old, white men, they’re certainly outliers. It’s up to conservatives to understand why.