Black Conservatives Are Right
Go Read Their Books
I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do with this substack. All of the substacks I read regularly are devoted to a singular topic, and this has never been something I was uniquely adept at. Although my job banned headphones at work (in order to perpetuate the illusion that we’re always working all the time), I did manage to read several books by Black conservatives that completely reoriented my view in a way that ten years on Twitter following Black identity activists never did:
Woke Racism: How A New Religion Has Betrayed Black America by John McWhorter
White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era by Shelby Steele
Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War by Wilfred Reilly
Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter To the Racial Grievance Industry by Taleeb Starkes
Blackout: How Black American Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation by Candace Owens
Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields (not conservative, but anti-identity/race first
politics).
I started with the amazing audiobook by Candace Owens after reading Conspirituality by Derek Beres (who has a podcast by the same name) because I got the impression that white liberals were only mad at white conservatives/MAGA/etc for basically not being liberals or being interested in identity politics. This view was solidified after reading Hey Hun, a memoir about MLM (multi-level marketing) schemes and how they’re supposed to be cults. The only problem is that the white, female author spends the entire book complaining about how MLMs are “supremacist” and there are no Black women in MLMs. And although she describes herself as moderate, she spends the whole book utilizing jargon found on Twitter and college campuses while also not taking a strong stance against white women who attended the January 6th riot.
I wanted to read Black conservatives because I still wanted a Black perspective, just not a liberal one (Black people aren’t really progressive; they’re race first activists. In Starkes’ book, he calls them Black identity activists - which is a term I want to start using as well).
And it’s too bad that out of all of these thinkers, only Candace Owens is known in the public eye and she’s kind of unhinged. I loved her book so much I started listening to her podcast (which has new episodes daily) and she spends a lot of time commenting on social media happenings and things in the news. I don’t pay any attention to conservative media, and had no idea she was fired from Daily Wire, where she fought with Ben Shapiro about the Israel/Gaza conflict where she equated it to Jim Crow. (Although Coleman Hughes did a great takedown of this, since other Black people hold this belief).
I also began to feel saddened by how little attention Black politics and attitudes generally receive in leftist spaces online. Although white liberals pat themselves on the back for supporting various, often unhinged, Black political talking points, they don’t really do deep dives into why Black people do the things they do. And Black conservatives don’t exist for a vast majority of liberals.
So, imagine my excitement when I read
’s pretty salient piece titled America Has Black Nationalism, Not Balkanization, ’s Americans need to find some way to debate Black nationalism and then another piece titled The Metapolitics of Black-White Conflict from that looks seriously at how Black Americans think, behave and even engage white people. And many of the comments on these posts are amazing too.I have thought about how, if someone hates “woke” ideology, they would need to find a way to push back against Black people, some of whom want to try to reclaim “woke” (which was originally AAVE) or see identity politics as Black politics. I’ve noticed that there aren’t any Black leftists (except maybe Toure or Adolf Reed), and there are some Black liberals who call themselves “cultural workers” which is basically DEI on crack. They talk about fascism and anti-capitalism, but moreso as it pertains to organizing and identity/personal impact. It seems to me that for these people the best pushback against fascism/capitalism is the power of friendship and reading books.
Even though I followed Black liberals on Twitter for ten years, there is a lot that always evaded me because I never really bought into it. A lot of Black women see DEI as essential, but this is probably because so many of them enter the fields seeking lucrative employment while openly prompting up white liberal values (but through a Black lens since a lot of Black liberals seem to hate/distrust white people).
Shelby Steele says that Black power is white guilt, and that white guilt created the pathway for Black people to accumulate wealth by bullying whites. Walt talks about white grievance when it comes to race grifting, but doesn’t explain how that works in this moment of white liberals actively participating in diversity hiring, and Black people needing to be denial about this so that they can express faux outrage when called out. If you say it’s racist to not hire Black people, and so Black people get hired because they are Black and white people are afraid of being called racist - how is that not a diversity hire when it’s literally about race?! (And what’s funny is that liberals are aware of this cognitive dissonance; you don’t actually know if/when you’re a diversity hire but to acknowledge that you are would be devestating and Black people are constantly trying to reclaim their dignity).
I am currently still on the look-out for books by Black conservatives who are still producing work. There’s Thomas Sowell, nearly 100, and
has a new book out (though I think he considers himself independent). has a new memoir out, and a substack/podcast that he does with John McWhorter, but as an academic, I find his focus tends to skew in a direction that I’m not always interested in.I don’t think that I can ever personally escape Black nationalism completely; after reading Steele’s book, I have become convinced of white liberalism’s inherent racism and feel strongly that white progressivism should be opposed everywhere and I do support/desire Black cultural spaces that non-Black people don’t have access to and I find white people unrepetently racist. I also would like to support Black artists, when I can, before other racial categories (depending on the art form).
But I’m not interested in racial solidarity, representation, DEI/identity politics or the race first politic that Black liberals love. And I’m not wholly convinced of the existence of systemic racism in American institutions either.
Pushing back against Black nationalism would also force white liberals’ hands and cause them to reveal their own politics for others (though not Blacks, who don’t care about white people) to see. Because right now, white liberals are fixated on depicting white conservatives (or anyone else really) as being racist for questioning or confronting Black nationalism - and that can’t end until people start taking Black politics serious in a real way.
But who knows when, or if, that’ll ever happen. Apparently, white people were afraid to say the word “negro” to buy a ticket for this new film, the American Society of the Magical Negro.
So we have a long way to go.