Voice of DISSENT - John McWhorter - Interview

BI: You voted for Ralph Nader, you think Murnia Abu-Jamal was wrongly imprisoned, yet you've been contacted, I assume warmly, by Ward Connerly and Clarence Thomas. You wrote that Black people should be open-minded about George Bush. You'e been described as a conservative. How do you describe yourself politically?

JM: I'm a centrist. "Black conservative" is a very sloppy label, because it means only one thing: a Black person who doesn't agree with facial preferences. That's it. One litmus test that you see is that Orlando Patterson, who wrote a very widely reviewed and very readable book called The Ordeal of Integration, says a lot of the things I say and is just as snippy in his tone sometimes as I am, but who decides that affirmative action ought to be continued. As such, somehow he keeps his good Black person's stripes. I'm the other litmus test. Because I don't believe in affirmative action, suddenly I am allied with Clarence Thomas. I can't fix that. The more you rail against a label, the more it's going to stick.

BI: Have any of these experiences changed your views or made you more open to conservative points of view?

JM: I would say that the experiences I've had since this book has come out have probably moved me a little bit to the right than I was before in terms of how I see a race getting ahead. I'm appalled at everything I see going on in the Bush administration, except for what relates to race. For me, it's becoming a wedge issue like abortion for some women. I'm not a Republican. This administration keeps reminding me I will never be a conservative. It's really how I feel about how a race moves up, and the idea that self-help or government-assisted self-help is a conservative position to take shows that our sense of what liberal and conservative is is getting extremely confused these days. My commitment is to raising a previously oppressed group upward that I belong to, and vet I'm a conservative? No. Clearly, that makes no sense. As time goes by, that label will lose its sting, as it becomes clear that we quote-unquote Black conservatives are the vanguard.

BI: What are the signs that Black conservatives are the vanguard?

JM: For example, there's a movement among Black ministers to develop closer relationships with Republicans, the idea being to solicit funds for churches to help inner-city communities. These ministers are not leftists in the sense of thinking that community pathology is OK because the White man won't cough up. But it's a more centrist Democratic than your Ishmael Reed would want. Here's another example: Shelby Steele 11 years ago caught holy hell with his book. I'm not catching as much. I have 1,100 pieces of mail, and of them, probably 400 of them are from Black people. And almost all of it is in praise. They're ordinary Black people who have stopped seeing themselves in the Black radical message of, say, the Congressional Black Caucus. There is a gestural lag, which is that Black people once they're in the voting booth, seem to think that the only party they should vote for is Democratic, but if you look at polls of how most Black people seem to feel about many things, we're not really a very Democratic race anymore, and that will start to show.