Why don’t more Black conservatives join the GOP?
One evening, freshman year, in our historically Black university’s theater-lit auditorium, a student explained why he was a Republican. The occasion was one of the semester’s mandatory civic seminars; the topic was the country’s two-party system. He was joined by other panelists: a couple of undergrads and a couple of faculty members - all of whom had problems with his party of choice. The Republican brand isn’t respected in much of Black America, so the audience would be tough, but he gave it the old college try.
His reasoning seemed sound. The Republican Party was a good fit for him because of its commitment to business and entrepreneurship, he said. By his lights, those things could deliver on the American Dream in a way that government could not - or would not. He had proof. Struggling to pay for used textbooks the previous semester, he spent his last few dollars on soap and ladder, bucket and brush. And off he went. Door to door, cleaning windows, earning enough to buy books, and creating a stream of income more helpful than any federal loan refund he’d received.
A little buzz built in the hall, full of aspiring professionals with entrepreneurial ideas, waiting for the part that was supposed to be objectionable.
The professor on the other end of the stage, in the gentle manner of an elder, hushed the murmuring with a question: “Congratulations, young man, on that ladder you bought. But would you be here tonight if you didn’t get those federal loans? And what will happen if you fall and break an arm or a leg or something? You might be a conservative, but I doubt you’re a Republican.”
This obvious distinction felt fresh to the room. The shortcut in contemporary American politics has long been that conservatives are Republicans. To be one is to be the other. Even we freshmen knew that. We also knew that Republicans are mostly White, that they surrendered leadership on civil rights to Democrats, and that the threats they saw to their way of life always seemed to look like us. And we knew conservatives in our families, one or two of them Republican on account of