I've been discussing the progress of the state of political advocacy and communications in the Right section of the black blogosphere. I recognize that most of us in the Conservative Brotherhood are un-ordinary. You can't be out here representing all this political stuff without being able to dish it and take it. But what about the average Joe?
I think everybody knows that Denzel is Republican, and it's easy for the extraordinary guy. I've always been a big fan, and there's that part of me that really finds it difficult to understand how it is that DW doesn't catch the flack that we do. I think the answer is that we have seen him do all sorts of things in his roles, but we don't see average black conservatives.
I've been thinking about some of the veterans and pros like Joe Hicks, Shannon Reeves, Bob Parks, Herman Cain and Michael King. These are people that have a tight network, know each other and know operatives in the Republican Party. They've been around and surely have their war stories. But it's not about them. Then I think there are folks like me and other black conservative bloggers who have been around a relatively short period of time - less than 7 years on the scene. We are starting to be influential in the public. But it still requires a little bit of an extraordinary initiative. That initiative has the appearance of being offset by the particular rarity of Republicans who happen to be black, and it is rather true what Spence says:
In an election like this there are no black independents. There are blacks who are predisposed to vote for McCain/Palin either for ideological reasons or because the GOP line is much shorter–blacks in the DNC are a dime a dozen, while blacks in the GOP are as rare as….well did you watch the Republican National Convention?
But most of us are not operatives on a mission to deliver pork back to the home base, nor lobbyists with legislative axes to grind, nor opportunists trying to make a buck or get some airtime for our own aggrandizement. Most black conservatives are merely center-right to right wing, but not interested in doing much more than speaking our minds and voting without being hounded into submission by accusations of self-hatred and worse.
I'm not going to pretend to be an average black conservative. I am a sucker for political philosophy and I can talk about it forever, even when I know it makes me appear much stranger than I actually am. But why is it that a black man cannot be a political philosopher without appearing strange? But more importantly, why is free thinking considered inimical to the black political agenda. Perhaps it is the very term 'black political agenda' that we've made a great deal of assumptions about and it's time for those assumptions to be unpacked. That's part of what I, and others, have been trying to accomplish all these years online.
It goes without saying that being a black conservative and consistently voting as an ideological Republican requires some independent thinking. After all, the great success of our forbears' political activism resulted in great changes in both parties and the national political landscape. The beneficiary of that has been the Democrats, by far. Nevertheless it often doesn't occur to people to think of Malcolm X as a religious conservative who wanted to pay no taxes, believed very strongly in the sanctity of marriage and held a high burden of proof for the Government. These are attributes largely associated with Republicans today. I happen to think this congruence is not ironic nor coincidental. They come from the same place in the souls of people. When you are fiercely independent and don't trust bureacracies to have your best interests at heart...well let me not go on. My point is that there are plenty of people who easily identify with Malcolm X as a strong black man who should have no problem identifying with Denzel, those professionals like Michael King and bloggers like me.
In the end, I say it should not be a matter of controversy at all
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