My recent edition of The Black Slate came out on Tuesday and I'm looking at race, religion, and the dnc. I wrote this piece a while back, right after the election I think...and did a little bit of editing the day before. Reads like it too incidentally, there's a paragraph near the end there that had me scratching my own head...and I WROTE it.
Anyway, while I'm not an atheist by any stretch of the imagination, I am highly skeptical of democratic party elites always coming to black people through churches. Makes me sick to my stomach. In fact, the more I think about it, the more hypocritical it is for the Dems to go to churches whenever they want black people, and then say WE need to get religion. Whatever.
Check out Jelani's piece on John McWhorter while you're at it. I've been wanting to take McWhorter on for a while now. He's one of the few conservative scholars--the only one as far as I am aware of--with a credible record of publishing in peer reviewed academic journals in his area of expertise. You'll NEVER find Shelby Steele in an English Lit journal though that is what he received his PhD in. Similarly I don't think you'll find Thomas Sowell in an economics journal either--he writes the hell out of some books, but Economists treasure books about as much as they treasure toilet paper when they don't have to go.
But McWhorter? A nice publication record. Which makes his intellectual laziness when it comes to race even that much harder to take. Jelani handles him though.
A few conservatives voted for Kerry over Bush. That in and of itself shouldn't disqualify him from the moniker. On racial issues--the issues that he writes about in his popular books--he is a conservative. Affirmative Action? Against it. Racial profiling? For it. Black culture? Bankrupt.
Of course there is a great deal of diversity among black conservatives. But these stances while not universal, are typical.
With Sowell, of course you are right. BUT here I myself become elitist. My writings here are for a popular audience, as are my writings for Africana.com. But at the same time I publish in the American Journal of Political Science, The Dubois Review, and the British Journal of Political Science. If you're going to talk about merit from the standpoint of the Academy, you are going to have to MODEL IT in my book. Sowell does not.
Does this make sense?
Posted by: Lester Spence at November 26, 2004 01:06 PMMakes sense.
Thanks for this one.
I'll read the McWhorter piece. A clarification though: McWhorter is a moderate, not a conservative. One, that is how he defines himself, which is accurate given his social liberalism. The guy voted for Kerry for crying out loud, and wrote an article about it. Conservative, uh no.
Your point about Steele is a valid one. I must take issue with Sowell though, whose books are in his field of expertise. This is the problem with the academy, its ivory tower nature, and its elitism whenever someone seeks to reach the populace. Books provide both peer-reviewed opportunities - which is done, given how various economists cite and critique his work - and opportunities for us regular folk to deconstruct what the author has to say.
Posted by: molotov at November 26, 2004 10:43 AM