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Introduction
- State University of New York Press
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Introduction I decided to write this book shortly after Ronald Reagan’s funeral. In the long lines of mourners who gathered to pay their respects to the president at the Capitol in Washington and the presidential library in Simi Valley, California, there were very few African Americans. In the course of the nearly week-long commemoration of Reagan’s life and legacy—where he was lauded as one of the nation’s greatest presidents—I did a number of interviews where I was asked to explain the absence of black mourners in Washington and Simi Valley . My explanations dealt less with Reagan as an individual or as president than with conservatism as a philosophy and ideology. Ronald Reagan was not mourned by many African Americans because he was a conservative, the most successful conservative president of the post–civil rights era and one of the most successful conservative presidents in the twentieth century. Conservatism as a philosophy and ideology, I explained, is and always has been hostile to the aspirations of Africans in America, incompatible with their struggle for freedom and equality. Thus, very few blacks could mourn the passing of a man who was an icon in the cause of twentieth-century American conservatism. In the nature of modern media it was difficult to convey this rather complex idea in a brief interview. However, I found that even in extended hour-long interviews it was difficult to fully explore this complex relationship between conservatism and black aspirations. Repeatedly, I was asked, “Are you saying that conservatism is racism, that all conservatives are racist?” “Aren’t there black conservatives? Are they racist?” “Are the millions of Americans who supported President Reagan racist?” “Are President George W. Bush and the conservatives who control the Congress and the courts hostile to African American interests?” My answer to most of these questions was a qualified yes. But the many qualifications and caveats left me, the interviewers, and the audience without the kind of clarity one would hope for when professors are called upon to explain complex issues to the public. In going through the literature on the subject of conservatism and race in the United States, I was not surprised to 1 2 Introduction find that there was no systematic treatment of the relationship between the two phenomena. Since the 1980s in the wake of the election of Reagan to the presidency, there have been a few books on blacks and conservatism and a couple of dozen articles. These works, however, are largely descriptive and deal mainly with the rise of black conservatives during the Reagan presidency. Thus, I wrote this book.1 In my interviews I contended that conservatism in America (I emphasize in America because my argument about conservatism and racism is specific historically and situationally to the United States) as a set of philosophical principles and as a governing ideology was hostile to black Americans. I also contended that as a separate matter the conservative movement that came to power with Reagan did so partly on the basis of racism. That is, I contended that a major part of the support of the conservative movement that elected Reagan was based on appeals to white supremacists and racists. In this regard, I noted that Reagan’s first campaign appearance after he received the Republican nomination was in Philadelphia, Mississippi. As other commentators noted during Reagan’s funeral, Philadelphia was the site of the murder of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan. In his Philadelphia speech Reagan invoked states rights, code words in the South for the right of whites to oppress blacks. In his first campaign for governor, Reagan made similar subtle appeals to racist whites in California. Thus, conservatism as a set of ideas is hostile to African Americans; Reagan as a candidate and as a president expressed this hostility; and the means by which he ascended to national power was rooted in a movement that was hostile to African Americans. Unlike the relationship between conservative ideas and race where there are hardly any studies, there is an extensive literature on the relationships among race, racism, and the ascendancy of the conservative movement in American politics beginning in the 1960s. Kevin Phillips, who in his 1968 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, did as much as any single individual to lay out the “southern strategy” that facilitated the conservative ascendancy, estimates that 35 percent of the Republican ascendancy can be attributed to racism.2 In this book I...