It is often said that X (formally known as Twitter) is not the real world, however, it’s a place for sharing ideas that impact the real world. One thing that has come out strong in my X experience this year is the fact that right-wing X is doing a lot of damage to the conservative movement. Permit me for the sake of this article to equate right wing with Republican and conservative.
When I first started interacting with Americans online, one thing that struck me as odd was the fact that African Americans voted overwhelmingly for the liberal Democratic party instead of the conservative Republican party.
This didn’t make sense to me as I suspected that Black people in America would be more conservative. I suspected they would favor such traditional values like strong family ties, discipline of children, religious participation, and being more conservative on things like homosexuality and transgenderism than their White peers.
Continued interactions with African Americans have proven my suspicions to be mostly correct. For example, it is often joked about how Black kids don’t talk back at their parents the way White kids do. Or that Black people discipline their kids more and would employ corporal punishment in doing so. This confirmed to me that Black America is at least more socially conservative than White America, but why then are African Americans not as politically conservative?
Several explanations have been given for this, one being that Black Americans have bought into the lies of the Democratic party about Republicans being racist and evil. Recently a Black man on Twitter made the case that the Republican party had to diversify, or it will die, to which the response was,
“Conservatives aren’t the problem. It’s the DNC’s control of the media that bombards Blacks with narratives about the White devil that we can’t get over.”
Another reason that is often given is that Democrats virtue signal to Black people using welfare, DEI, and affirmative action policies. On the surface, these explanations made sense, they seemed sufficient to explain African American voting behavior.
But as I gained more insight, I’ve come to realize that there is more to this and that there is perhaps a defensible logic behind African American voting behavior. It is not for no reason that the Republican party is a huge turn-off for Black Americans.
The first reason that became apparent to me is that the Republican party has sort of given up on courting Black voters, believing Blacks would always vote Democrat, they refuse to commit resources to campaigns that would get them more Black votes. In the tweet I quoted earlier, an X user made that argument by saying,
“You cannot court what you disdain. The GOP will drain itself rather than craft conservative policy to attract new voters”.
It seems many Black people feel the Republican party doesn’t want them and Republicans aren’t even trying to change that perception. You can’t blame Black people for not buying what’s not offered for sale. The truth is the Republican party has not offered itself as an attractive option to Black Americans.
Rob Smith, a Black and gay Republican was recently harassed by a group of White Republicans at a conservative event. Watching a clip of the harassment video it was astonishing to see that Rob, a prominent Black conservative who has been very vocal about his support for Trump, the Republican party, and conservatives would be treated in such a manner.
Another reason for Black loathing of the Republican party is that Republicans seem to be dismissive of the concerns of Black people. One of the things Black people sometimes complain of in America is that they are often the victims of police harassment and police brutality. This is mostly dismissed by those on the right as Black people playing the victim, but what does the evidence say?
Roland Fryer did a study on this, but if you listened to conservatives talk about Fryer’s research, you would think that the only thing the research showed was no disparity in police killing of unarmed Black people versus unarmed White people. But that was not all there was to that study. Fryer lamented that both left and right misunderstand and misrepresent the empirical data he provided.
His study had been so misinterpreted that Fryer in a Wall Street Journal article had to clarify his position. He opened that op-ed with the following statements.
“I have led two starkly different lives—that of a Southern black boy who grew up without a mother and knows what it's like to swallow the bitter pill of police brutality, and that of an economics nerd who believes in the power of data to inform effective policy.
In 2015, after watching Walter Scott get gunned down, on video, by a North Charleston, S.C., police officer, I set out on a mission to quantify racial differences in police use of force. To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often”.
As for what his research shows, Fryer claims the following:
"There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force
"Compliance by civilians doesn't eliminate racial differences in police use of force."
"We didn't find racial differences in officer-involved shootings."
Some conservatives like to point to this last finding to rebut claims of racial disparities in policing without noting that Fryer's other findings from the same research suggest just the opposite, nor do they note the limitations of Fryer's research (which he himself is quick to acknowledge). This section was culled from Reason Magazine
Conservatives famously demean Black people by suggesting that Black people are incompetent and rely on affirmative action or DEI policies. The most recent example is the case of Claudine Gay. Claudine was one of three Ivy League school presidents who gave an answer that can be described as contextually off, and they have all had serious backlash for their answers, however, only one person—the Black person—of the three, has been accused of being incompetent. When you ask what the basis of that accusation is, what you get is that her answer shows that she is incompetent.
Bo Winegard a right-wing account said the following,
“The problem is precisely that progressives zealously promote affirmative action whose function is to privilege less qualified Black people over more qualified White people. Recognizing this is not racist; it is rational. Those who dislike it should end affirmative action.”
Is the purpose of affirmative action to promote less qualified Black people over qualified White people? Or is it to improve access to opportunities for qualified Black people to thrive?
Do they really think that affirmative is just picking any random Black person for a position they are not qualified to hold?—this can happen, but certainly not the majority of the time—or are they rightly choosing from a pool of qualified Black candidates who may not have had the opportunity to get those positions?
On further questioning of some of my conservative friends on X on why they think Claudine Gay is incompetent, one of them answered that a Black person is more likely to be an affirmative action hire and that is evidenced by when Biden said he was going to pick a Black woman as supreme court justice to which I said, did Biden appoint Claudine Gay? Just because something is true for one Black person doesn’t mean it’s true for every Black person.
He continued that his company was filled with DEI policies, he went on to say that when his company reserved certain positions for Black people, they contacted every Black person who was qualified for the position for an interview. I don’t know if that was a slip, but by the admission that his company contacted qualified Black people to interview for the position he undermined his own argument.
I consider the pre-civil rights era in America as affirmative action for White people, specifically White men. Certain opportunities were only open to White people, not because other groups were incompetent, but because only Whites were allowed. A key example was that of a certain Black man, Mr. Hood who was denied admission to Emory medical school in 1959, because as the rejection letter states, “admission was not open to people of the Negro race”.
Nobody seemed to say then that it was affirmative action for White people when certain opportunities were only open to White people, but it was.
These are just a few examples of the sort of ideas about Black people that are held in right-wing/conservative/republican circles. Why would Black people want to associate with a group that is dismissive of their concerns, stereotypes them as criminals and welfare queens, and believe them to be incompetent? It seems unreasonable to require association from Black people when your actions are hostile towards them.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
Charles Ekokotu (Pharm. D.) is a bibliophile, prose fiction writer, poet, and playwright. His first self-published novel, Hotel Shendam—a crime fiction novel featuring a debate on race and colonialism—is available on Amazon. A very fun read! Grab a copy now!
Follow Charles Ekokotu on:
YouTube
X
Critical African Thinkers on X
Substack
Thank you. I'm glad you liked it.
I have no idea why my Twitter account is suspended.
You can also reach me on Twitter as Critical African Thinkers
https://x.com/_CriticalAT?t=GTZxwS4n_DCLgiq3HLaegA&s=09
Interesting perspective, Mr. Ekokotu.
I think that critics of Conservative viewpoints often misrepresent a perspective of "That situation is better now" with a false inference of "That situation was never a problem".
A claim that today's police are not SYSTEMICALLY racist or brutal is NOT a claim that any individual racism or brutality doesn't exist, or never did.
A claim that affirmative action is damaging to both its current victims and its purported beneficiaries is NOT a claim that alternate versions of the concept haven't existed in the past, such as your statement, "Nobody seemed to say then that it was affirmative action for White people when certain opportunities were only open to White people, but it was."
This has become a large part of the problem even in instances where the basis of a point is valid - our society has become too lazy to truly research and debate on merits, so they take turns citing outlier scenarios which support their agendas but don't accurately represent the views of the majority they're trying to condemn. Every group has exceptions, which by definition are not the rule.
This is covered in greater depth in "A White Man's Perspectives on Race and Racism". Please check it out. smashwords.com/books/view/1184004