I
would like to say thanks to Cobb who was open to doing an interview on
why he founded the Blog Collective called ‘The Conservative
Brotherhood’. He talks about where he came from, why he is a ‘Black
Republican’ (currently dropping ‘black’ from Republican), and why he
founded the Conservative Brotherhood, and what he would like to see it
become. When you get a chance, visit his blog by clicking HERE or visit his general site by clicking HERE
Note: The currently listed members of the Conservative Brotherhood in addition to Cobb are: Our friend Booker Rising, Lashawn Barber, Duane Brayboy (Black Informant), Tavares Forby (Black Pundit), Desmond Hunter, Michael King, Ambra Nichol, Juliette Ochieng, Joseph C Phillips, Samantha Pierce (Uncle Sam’s Cabin), Darmon Thorton, Avery Tooley, and Scott Wickam
First Tell us a little about yourself?
I grew up in Southern California and have very vivid memories of the
late 60s. We spoke swahili at home and celebrated kwanzaa at the very
beginning of the movement. Pops was a scholarly nationalist. I was the
oldest of five kids and we grew up in a neighborhood overrun with kids.
I attended catholic school and was a ‘brainiac’. I did the
scholar-athlete thing in Highschool but all I really cared about was
computers, soccer and diving. Still, I tended to be philosophical even
then. I wondered why everybody else’s folks weren’t serious about the
Movement. I worked four years out of highschool then worked my way
through a computer science undergrad at the state U. I got involved
heavily in campus and national student politics through NSBE which
really changed my life. I went overboard with Thomas Sowell even though
I had worked with the Rainbow Coalition. I did the Joe College stuff
big time making up for lost time. I wound up at Xerox Systems Group and
became an evangelist of sorts for their technology. It all made pefect
sense to me. After Xerox fumbled, I decided to work as a field
consultant. It was all about building systems where the customers were.
I haven’t changed much on that score. I was king of the Buppies during
the 80s - pretty much all the way through. BMW, Nordstrom’s wardrobe,
American Express card.. the whole deal.
I moved to NYC in 1991 after the death of my brother and watched the LA
Riots from Brooklyn. I pretty much abandoned the Buppie scene in ‘90
and started indulging my artistic sensibilities. Read a lot of the Critical
Theorists, and Blues Aesthetic. Wrote a lot of performance poetry and
got online to do community work. Also my discovery of what was going on
in Namibia, Oliver North’s crap and the invasion of Grenada put my
patriotism on ice. So I was doing the whole Chomsky bit for a while. I
settled in around Cornel West in an attempt to be what he was trying to
be when he cut his extra wack hiphop album.
Marriage and kids pulled me out of the radical mode and in 1994 for the
first time I got serious about making money. Finally, it wasn’t about
me. I was 33 at the time and realized how simple life could be. I’d say
that fact and reading Gwaltney really changed my perspective about
blackfolks.
I moved back to California in 1997 and soon did the whole Silicon
Valley thing. All these years, since 92, 93 I had been on the internet. At
Xerox, before that, I ran the internal Blacknetwork. It was all a part
of my writing life which started back in 1982. It was the performance
poetry that gave me the courage to say what I really believed in front
of people, so I’ve always been fearless online.
What gave you the idea to start the Conservative Brotherhood?
It was a long time coming really. I mean for a decade I’ve been looking
for a community of blackfolks who did some serious intelligent writing
about the issues of the day. It wasn’t until the invention of blogs
that folks who have been there all along had the ability to control their
online environment enough to get out the cogent thinking that had been
going on.
From my perspective, the Conservative Brotherhood needed to be because
what conservative blacks were and are saying is more important for the
nation to hear than the standard liberal and progressive lines. I
believe that we are the only ones creating new opportunity for
blackfolks - we’re felling trees in a new direction, everybody else is
on safe, plowed under ground. So I borrowed a relatively tried and
true idea, a blog league (I had already joined the Bear Flag League) and
said let’s do it.
I had already tried and failed to create a grass roots web community. I
bought the domain oldschoolrepublicans.net and built it, but nobody
came. I had been hanging out on Yahoo and various other public forums
but I wasn’t particularly impressed. In fact I went to Project 21 as
well, and I just didn’t see that they had the bandwidth to handle all
the issues in a form appropriate for my interests. In the end it had to
be bloggers.
Who are the members, and how were they selected?
I sent out emails to the right of center bloggers I respected the most.
Every one of them was an independent thinker, a proven blogger, a good
writer and beholden to no one. It was very easy to see who these folks
were. Everybody accepted, and we were off.
Where do you see the Conservative Brotherhood going down the line?
I have committed to help build a portal site which will RSS all of TCB
posts and then attaching a commenting community to that. It should work
pretty much like Daily KOS in structure. As the members do their own
thing, the notariety should grow - I certainly plug it when I’m invited
to speak. We registered with NZ Bear as a blog community. We’ll
probably have another round of inductions this year. We lost Michael King to big
media and he’ll be missed, but time marches on. I think the outlook is
bright.
We’ll probably collaborate to get a little more specific on policy
positions and common shared values and their implications. But we have
done well in being a diverse group of right opinions without any kind
of orthodoxy or litmus tests that cause unnecessary friction. That’s
important because we said from the first that there are plenty of
different kinds of right of center African Americans. We are actually a
pretty broad coalition.
What does being a ‘black’ conservative mean to you?
It means headaches. Being a black conservative is painting a target on
your head - it’s unconventional and something of a radical move. People
simply don’t believe that blackfolks are in their right mind to be
conservative. As soon as you start representing that way you enter a
new realm and it’s very easy to get in trouble - not because of what you’re
saying, but because you are saying it at all. There are very few
conservative ideas that blackfolks haven’t heard or acknowledged, it’s
just that American notions of what a black man or woman can get up and
say in public is very limited, and this is a direct consequence of
racial stereotypes against us. But again, the problem is mainly one of
deportment. Can you stand up saying out loud what you really believe
without making a fool of yourself?
So that’s the first hurdle, and believe me it’s a big one. Then you
have to navigate and situate yourself within the broad American Right.
Because it’s foreign territory for people who don’t live it, you
instantly get associated with people and ideas you don’t even know.
Like suddenly I’m an apologist for Tom DeLay and I’m supposed to account for
him? For someone like me who is a relatively recent convert to the
Republican Party, you have to deal with your own stereotypes of the
Right and with the Left’s stereotypes of the right. Basically, people
who don’t want to work through all that just throw up their hands and
call you a traitor to the race, which is the biggest spitwad they can
hurl.
After you get through all that, you now have to reconcile yourself to
your position and ask exactly what is it that you bring to the table.
What does this new world need or want from you? Sometimes it’s just
your black face, and that’s a letdown. The GOP wants votes and money, the
ideologues and thinktankers want insights and rhetorical support. The
local activists want feet on the street and bodies volunteering.
Everybody wants something.
It’s a tricky road to navigate, especially if you’re being thoughtful
about it. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but that’s my way. I want to leave
no implication unconsidered. So I pay attention to my impact as a black
conservative and as a conservative black. It’s not dual consciousness
because I know my own path and where I’m heading, but I do consider
what multiple political communities are thinking in relationship to my
vector. In this regard I’ve been especially careful to recognize my own
roots in Progressive politics even through bitter disagreement. It
means nothing to me if the whole process isn’t organic. If I didn’t think
that African Americans don’t already have well-lived-in reasons to ‘be’
conservative, I wouldn’t bother with the black label.
In the end I’m getting rid of ‘black’ with regard to the label of
‘black Republican’ because of that essential understanding. There is nothing
about being black that procludes one from being a good Republican
except fear to face all the challenges I’ve mentioned above. Once you deal
with the existential hurdles it’s over. You’re no more a black Republican
than you are black Bachelor of Science. Yeah there was a time when
there were none, but get over it. I think it should only be a temporary
label, and I think I had a tough time getting through it because I did much of
my conversion in public in broad daylight as an advocate. I’ve got a
hundred essays to prove it.
How did you come by your political views?
I would say that I have had two or three major epiphanies, but it has
always been a practical evolution for me. I never read a book like
‘Profiles in Courage’ and said — ooh that’s the political thing I
aspire to. My politics are part of my civic duty, something I feel very
strongly. I tend to be philosophical, and I want to know what politics
does, and why is what politics do well not done as well by science or
religion. I view politics as a way to acquire and act on knowledge.
What’s interesting about political ideology is they are generally
shaped by what people are interested in ignoring and discounting, which is
kind of the opposite of economics which is shaped by people’s perception of
their self-interest. Its tangential to faith which is shaped by
people’s perception of the unknowable.
What I refused to know prior to my conservative epiphany was the cost
of dismissing the ambitions of the middle class. That is what Stalin did
and what despots do all over the world. But it’s also what bohemians
and revolutionaries do - and a lot of Progressives come from that
orientation. I know I did. When I decided that the interests of home
and family and middle class mediocrity are essential to the fabric of a
stable and prosperous nation the appeal of conservatism became
immediately clear to me. I was back where I was as a college freshman
reading Sowell for the first time and the middle class became a
beautiful thing.
I think that if I would have gotten rich in Silicon Valley as I planned
to, I’d still be a pretentious progressive, or libertarian.
Finally, do you honestly, all rhetoric aside, feel that the
Republican Party would do black Americans right in terms of economic, social,
and political development or would an aggressive third party be a better
fit?
Black Americans who have every honest desire to get with the mainstream
economy, society and politics are going to be indistinguishable by the
party. Until you start putting race on the 1040 forms and the IRS stops
giving tax cuts by race, were already automatically in the program. I
think that people who would rather have the squishy soulful things than
inclusion in the vast anonymous dont-care-if-youre-black mainstream are
going to be left out. The Republican Party is not going to make any
special considerations for the psychic burden of being black, and they
shouldn’t. That should be on blacks to do their own mental liberation.
Part of being an American is about getting paid. So the the extent that
the Republicans are good for doing some of that, then you owe it to
yourself to get in line with everybody else.
I think that social development is the tough thing, and I recognize
thatblack political traditions put a heavy burden on things that
Republicans don’t pay much attention. So there is a trade off. But I think it’s a
trade-off that upscale and independent minded African Americans can
easily make - that is if they care about politics at all. I’m putting
it at 25%. Black families that are in the Cosby Show / Different World
demographic are right there. I mean Denzel Washington is Republican, so
what’s so hard to understand about where he’s coming from?
An aggressive third party? That will be the Greens if they get a
foothold, but I suppose I’d rather have them than what Germany has,
Christian Democrats. But I don’t think the prospects for a third party
in the US are good at all. It really depends on how far Christian
fundamentalists push the Republicans and how seriously the GOP takes
them. There’s a big difference between Bill Bennett and Pat Robertson,
and if the Robertsons win, the Bennetts will bolt.
African Americans who want somebody to romance them politically have no
chance. That’s because there’s almost nobody in the hiphop generation
who has an intellectual understanding of what their own parents
generation was all about in supporting the Brown decision and King’s
vision of integration. Our own kids are out of step politically, so how
is some non-existant third party going to do right by those of us who
grew up on Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye? That’s what’s goin on.
You've got to admit, there is a slight resemblance. Scholar found this the other day and is 
Sometimes spontaneity is not a good idea. I spontaneously shaved my face this Sunday. I was at home, I had nothing to do, the shaver was in my hand and I dared myself. And without a second thought I proceded to scare my children to death. I have never even taken a DMV picture this hideous.
Recent Comments