About a year ago, I penned a post entitled “Taking Thomas Seriously”, about the particularly political ideology held by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In it, I noted that both liberals and conservatives misunderstood Thomas’ orientation because the tried to map him onto “standard” (White) political categories. Thomas is a conservative, yes, but specifically he is a Black Conservative, which is a very particular philosophical tradition that does not perfectly align with plain old vanilla White conservatives.
Not all Black conservatives are Black Conservatives (that is, there are conservative Black people, such as Ward Connerly, who I would not identify as part of the Black Conservative tradition), and, more importantly, not all Black Conservatives are conservative (in that, on our “traditional” left/right axis, some would be placed on the left). However, because most people, particularly most Whites, aren’t familiar with Black Conservative ideology, it leads to significant misunderstanding about where its adherents are coming from when they do show up on the national stage. All this is preface to point out that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he who has nearly derailed Obama’s campaign, is a Black Conservative. To be sure, he’s not a conservative (needless to say, capitalization matters in this post). But he’s not a “liberal” either — his political alignment doesn’t comfortably fit onto models premised on White ideological positioning. Black Conservatism, like Black Liberalism, is not wholly divorced from “standard” Conservatism and Liberalism — but at best they intersect at odd angles.