An Evans-Manning Award for an excellent comment in the thread below goes to Dennis Sanders, an openly gay, African-American Republican reader of this blog, who says:
The fact of the matter is, Rod is correct that white conservatives aren’t going to give up that which makes them conservative, such as their opposition to affirmative action. It’s not because they are racist and want to preserve the white race as much as it is reverse sense of unfairness in a time when jobs are not as plentiful.
But Rod and other conservatives have to understand that dismantling things like affirmative action and then offering nothing in its place except nostrums about opportunity gives blacks the impression that white conservatives don’t care about blacks and don’t understand the minefield we walk through in trying to go to college, find employment or advance in the workplace.
Here’s an example. Back in the 50s, my Dad and some relatives drove up from their native Louisiana to look for jobs at Caterpillar in Illinois. Dad said they came to plant asking for work and some white official said there were no jobs to be had even though white men were finding work at the plant. Dad later went to Michigan to find work in GM.
It’s a safe bet that blacks my age and younger hear these stories from their parents and grandparents. It’s seared into our brains that the world is unfair and will look us over for a white person with less experience. So, when the average black guy hears a white conservative talking about ending affirmative action, they go back to the stories their elders told them and interpret this as “the white man wants to keep us black folk down.”
This is a long way of saying that there needs to be a real discussion on race between African Americans and conservatives. But it has to be a real discussion where we are open to listening to each other’s fears and hurts without immediately judging the other person. We can’t do what John McWhorter has long talked about, have a “conversation on race” which is little more than the black person yelling about how unfair life is and the white person just taking it in. We have to have a real discussion, a willingness to really listen to one another and then find ways to bring African Americans into the Republican tent. But that means setting aside our pain just a little so that we can hear each other.
I appreciate this perspective. Depressingly, however, it calls to mind a post I put up earlier this year about why honest conversation about race is pretty much impossible.
Mark in LA 
Tyro 
EngineerScotty 
M_Young 
pjsmoov 
JonF 
I think the conversation is being had. One important aspect of it is this: Will racism–a disdain for or fear of the other–win votes or lose them? In recent generations it served as a strategy to win votes. I think perhaps what we’re seeing in the last several years is a reversal. Racism loses votes (I hope the trend continues).
White supremacists like to buzz around this blog, and the “conversation” as it is framed here is unfortunately skewed by that presence. I like to think that Rod doesn’t believe in the theories put forth by his white supremacist fans (or at least not most of them), but being that as it may, an intelligent, forthright, mutually respectful conversation is never gonna happen in that context. Big whoop.
But I really believe that *most* grievances that white people might feel with regard to minority populations probably aren’t based in some kind of formal eugenic theory.
No, the grievances most folks have are probably about affirmative action, or crime, or cultural/familial values that seem strange or unpleasant to them, or about suddenly finding themselves in situations where everyone looks different from them, or speaks a different language, and feeling uncomfortable and no longer “in charge.” I know that some folks–everywhere, but particularly in the south–are just racist as a matter of course, in a sort of background way, because that’s the way their parents were, and their parents before them, etc. But I also bet you that a lot of those people have kids who voted for Obama. And I bet that if one of those folks was for some reason thrown in with a black person who was their socioeconomic equal and held similar values (a situation that is becoming more and more common), that person wouldn’t go home at night thinking terrible things or muttering the n-word to themselves about their colleague…no, they’d probably just take the relationship for what it was: a connection between two equals. Sometimes awkward but more often just…normal.
I just don’t think that most middle-class white folks buy into the idea that black people are intellectually inferior animals who got (and get) what they deserved in the manifestation of our country’s history. Heck, even the ones who pick that bone again and again, here and on some other conservative websites, are more comfortable stating their views in anonymity. Based on the way the whole thing played out over the last four years, I’ve just gotta believe that the majority of white folks didn’t feel terribly proud when their elected (or not) representatives started sending out base and ignorant emails denigrating our president and his wife and children based on the color of their skin. I don’t think most white voters bought into the idea put forth by some politicians that *we* are the real americans and anyone with a funny name or different features than ours must of course be terrifying, threatening operatives intentionally working against our country’s greater good. In today’s political landscape those notions just seemed petty and stupid, unrelated to the main concern, which is getting our economy and our middle class going again. And you bet that played a part in Romney’s loss earlier this month.
On the other side, I don’t think there is one person in close-knit black communities who would argue that gangs are great for the neighborhood, or that it’s just fine to live in a place where children are getting killed in gang-related violence every single week, where bands of malnourished and undereducated kids roam the neighborhood at night looking for trouble because their parents are gone–in jail or dead or high or working overtime every night just to put food on the table, or whatever. None of the black people I have known on a personal level think that hardcore thug culture is anything but ridiculous and dangerous, or that the blighted African American communities created by public housing etc. are anything but a tragedy (Though some–not all–might understand better than I would what circumstances lead black kids or black parents to make those choices, or end up stuck in that life.)
Anyway, all this is just to say that there are common points of interest, common values here, and as the country becomes more diverse, as global culture increasingly makes inroads even to businesses and schools in middle-america–where a darker-skinned engineer from Bangalore, or Paris, or whatever, might be assigned to a project along with three white dudes from Georgia and an chinese-american girl from Toledo–those conversations will be easier to have, and those common values will become more pronounced.
I don’t think it’s the underbelly that forms the culture; I don’t think it’s the unapologetic southern racists or the white supremacists, I don’t think it’s the gangbangers or violence-glorifiers. It’s the middle class. I repeat my contention in the earlier thread that the conversation isn’t going to be, and shouldn’t be, about experiences specific to black people, it’s got to be about our common experiences if it is going to do any good. As even the white supremacists on the blog note, as people from different cultural backgrounds marry and have children, and as multinational corporations increasingly dominate the business world, concepts of “white” and “black” will change (are changing) dramatically. The “conversation” as it is perceived here (white vs. black, Mayflower vs. Affirmative Action, etc. etc.) seems retrograde and obsolete in 2012. Imagine how much more so it will be in 2020.