Some prominent black conservatives don’t seem to have gotten the message…yet.
Just as Obama has touched black Democratic voters, he has engendered conflicting emotions among black Republicans. They revel over the possibility of a black president but wrestle with the thought that the Illinois senator doesn’t sit beside them ideologically.
“Among black conservatives,” [Armstrong] Williams said, “they tell me privately, it would be very hard to vote against him in November.”
One of the central conceits of black conservatism I’ve seen - both in its appeal and its acceptance - is the idea that black Americans simply need to get over the race thing (notice how this keeps coming back up?), and that the real path forward is through the “nonracial” (predominantly white) acceptance of supply side gospel and social conservative principle. The reason that so many in the black community view black conservatives with suspicion is this idea that one sells their birthright, their blackness, for a bowl of tax cuts and anti-gay initiatives. For the vast majority of us, the black American experience is an undeniable and irrefutable part of who we are, not something that’s an either/or competitor with Social Security privatization.
Of course, there’s the flip side: