Well, CPAC managed to gather all four of the black people at this Conference and put them on stage together, for "Conservative Solutions for Urban America."

 

All the usual gripes and outrage of the more conservative contingency of the black middle class were heard--we can't blame problems on the color of our skin, we must live now and forget the history of oppression, BET is ruining our youth, etc. "Antebellum rednecks have got nothing on MTV and BET, the minstrel show that is pumped into our children's brains daily," said the Congress for Racial Equality's Niger Innis. 

Some of these complaints represent common ground with people on the left--for instance, when Campus Progress hosted a showing of "Beyond Beats and Rhymes" in Los Angeles not three weeks ago, the panel including "conscious" rapper Talib Kweli spent much time ridiculing BET's founder Bob Johnson, who Innis maligned by name at this CPAC panel. In fact, Innis even critiqued Fox News for focusing their (albeit negative) coverage on figures like P. Diddy, and the media in general for presenting a warped and narrow vision of black people, as indication of their totally skewed priorities. "We care more about Anna Nicole Smith and what Britney is shaving or not wearing than a war being fought by our young people." I certainly couldn't argue with that.

When they did choose to focus on the past is where they lost me. Mychal Massie, of the National Center for Public Policy: "Slavery is over." Sure. "The civil rights struggle is over." Okay, maybe. Then, "we went from Martin Luther King to Superfly." Weird...what happened to the Black Panthers? Apparently they were part of a "militant movement that glorified a motherland that never existed" and ridiculed Martin Luther King. Not surprisingly, there was no mention of how King did get more aggressive and spoke out against the Vietnam War at the end of his life. "We went from Duke Ellington to Snoop Dogg," and, most interestingly, "we went from Shirley Chisolm to Barack Obama." Did I miss something? I guess Obama is a lamentable candidate because his father is from Africa, which doesn't exist.

Then shit got crazy. Apparently the Democrats are to blame for any poverty there is in the inner cities, because they have a monopoly on urban municipal government, whose anti-poverty policies clearly aren't working (I wonder what a Republican-controlled city government would propose--cut taxes?). They denounced the notion of Bill Clinton as the first black presdient, then unironically thanked God for welfare reform. AND THEN--get ready--they noted the national security interests at stake in urban America: Communists were able to exploit the economic marginalization of blacks, so what's to stop al-Qaeda from doing the same?

What was lacking, naturally, was any sort of knowledge of institutional racism. When a former cop asked about the possibly debilitating effect of the War on Drugs on the black community and the disproportionate arrests and cases of abuse against blacks, Innis and Massie had the balls to tell him that they rejected the premise of his question, and that the police profession should always be properly revered.

 

When a young man from Virginia asked about the widening gap between the rich and poor, his concern was similarly ignored. Frances Rice, of the National Black Republican Association, and also the moderator, stated that even asking what to do about the gap was illegitimate. The poor end, she said, was poor because of socialist Democratic policies.  

Despite all this craziness, the panel made it easy to see why black Republicans are on the rise. With the media (or the "entertainment-industrial complex" as Innis refered to it) constantly associated with the left, middle and upper class black people can reimagine their moral outrage at what they see as a shameful and misrepresentative hip-hop culture in partisan terms. They can also pin the drug-addled vagrancy they see in some black neighborhoods on the mythic welfare state, which they are convinced still exists and is a centerpiece of Democratic policy. And, of course, they can peddle historical narratives like "We went from Martin Luther King to Jesse Jackson," as if the two represent polar opposite ideologies.....despite the fact that Jackson was by MLK's side on the day he died.