Black History Month 2004 Had Little Recognition of Conservative Blacks by Jan Ireland

Black History Month 2004 Had Little Recognition of Conservative Blacks

By Jan Ireland

March 05, 2004

Black History Month 2004 has just passed. I looked all month for national recognition of conservative blacks. I found very little.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, the first black to head the state department, and Condoleeza Rice, first black, and first woman, to be National Security Advisor, were covered mainly in relation to the Iraq war. Powell was hinted to be at odds with President Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. Rice was asked if intelligence was hyped. Both were called racist names by West Indies singer Harry Belafonte, who escaped all consequences for doing so.

Florida Democrat Representative Corinne Brown told Bush official Roger Noriega that Haiti's current problems were "because of all you white men" and that "you guys all look the same" when Noriega pointed out that he was Mexican-American. Brown likely will suffer no consequences for her words. Senator Trent Lott, a white conservative, did for his.

In North Carolina, Vernon Robinson could very well be elected the first black Republican congressman since J.C. Watts, by the same voters who once elected Senator Jesse Helms. Certainly newsworthy. But Robinson's positions of a strong national defense, enforced immigration laws, and the abolition of racial quotas apparently remove him from national media attention.

Conservative black economists Walter Williams, professor of Economics at George Washington University, and Thomas Sowell, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, write cogently about the nation's economy and its outlook. National journalists aren't lining up for quotes.

Californian Ward Connerly's Racial Privacy Initiative fights for racial equality through racial color blindness, the only way possible to achieve it. We don't want separate but equal colors of skin, though our segregated dormitories and graduation proms today apparently do. Connerly has been vilified for his positions.

Oberlin High School, in Ohio, replaced an experienced and qualified white teacher who was slated to teach black history. The public outcry called for a black who could 'understand' the black experience. Would those same people refuse treatment for cancer, from a doctor who had never experienced cancer himself? Could that doctor 'understand' their pain and suffering? Could an adoptive mother 'understand' mothering, without having experienced pregnancy and labor herself?

The Reverend Al Sharpton, running for the Democrat nomination for president, has a bully pulpit from which he could highlight conservative black achievement. He uses it instead to finagle racial points with the Democrat party, and to bash the white conservative who occupies the White House now.

Democrat presidential candidates spent a lot of time in black churches recently, reliving the 60's format. The Acton Institute's Anthony B. Bradley's "Beyond Black History" takes issue with this one size fits all way of looking at blacks in America. As he says, there is no 'black' vote. Even if they once did, black church congregations today do not expect a single pastor to tell them how to vote. Nor do they wait for information to come to them in the form of Democrat politicians 'preaching' from their pulpits. And there is no single black 'leader', as much as Sharpton and Jesse Jackson would like the world to think there is.

D.C. Parents for School Choice aired a television ad comparing Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) to segregationist Bull Connor, asking "Senator Kennedy, your brothers fought for us. Why do you fight against us? Are the unions really more important than these children?" They were vilified for the ad.

Star Parker, author of "Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can Do About It", spoke recently at a C-SPAN2 (Book TV) televised luncheon. Parker is black, and a frequent campus speaker. … Oh, but that was through the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, for Conservative Women's Network.

'And just where is the other conservative mention of black conservatives?' liberals no doubt are moved to ask. Don't really know. Haven't looked. Conservatives don't think it is necessary to color code.

We like to celebrate the content of the character. Something a black conservative once recommended. The values of the Democrat party Martin Luther King, Jr., supported - would be Republican today. Black history suffers immensely by pretending conservative blacks don't exist.

With luck, Black History Month 2005 will reflect the black experience - all of it.