How Conservatism Misses Black America

In our Manichean cultural reality, it can seem like the only two options for black Americans are either to embrace a leftist identity politics or to eschew blackness as a meaningful part of their identity altogether. While we sometimes hear the latter option presented as the conservative embrace of Martin Luther King Jr’s vision for a color-blind brotherhood of man, this is one of those gross over-simplifications that veers into straightforward falsehood. This caricature of MLK’s vision is neither true to him nor to a conservative vision of what it is to be truly human. Instead, black Americans occupy a unique position: they inherit a cultural tradition cultivated over the past 250 years, not because of the genetic facts related to the color of their skin, but simply because the exclusion they experienced based on their color shaped them into a genuine community with identifiable traditions and customs.

The fact that today’s conservatives have trouble grasping the reality of this communal identity only goes to show that they have absorbed an anorexic, hyper-individualistic account of the human person arising from a certain strand of contemporary libertarianism. The thicker and richer tradition of historical classical liberalism, however, includes all of the conservative insights about human sociality, custom and tradition as sources of identity, and the importance of communities of practice for the cultivation of virtue.

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