Black Conservatism Is Not Betrayal — It’s Algebra

Frederick Douglass was a Republican. This is not a gotcha. It is not a trivia question deployed to win an argument at Thanksgiving dinner. It is a historical fact that illuminates something far more important than partisan allegiance: it reveals that Black conservatism — the belief in self-reliance, property ownership, entrepreneurship, moral discipline, and skepticism of government dependency — is not a modern aberration. It is the oldest continuous intellectual tradition in Black American life, older than the NAACP, older than the Urban League, older than every organization that currently claims to speak for Black America, and its deliberate erasure from the public conversation about what Black people are supposed to think is one of the most successful acts of intellectual suppression in American cultural history.

Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 and spent the next fifty-seven years of his life arguing, with a rhetorical power that has few equals in the English language, that Black Americans needed freedom, not charity; opportunity, not patronage; the right to compete, not the right to be protected from competition. “The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us,” Douglass said in 1865. “I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” This was not a conservative talking point manufactured by a think tank. This was a formerly enslaved man telling the most powerful nation on earth that the best thing it could do for Black people was to get out of their way.

The Tradition That Was Buried

Booker T. Washington, who founded Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and built it into the most successful Black educational institution in the country, articulated a philosophy of Black advancement that was, in its essentials, deeply conservative. Washington believed that economic independence was the prerequisite for political power, that Black Americans should acquire land, build businesses, master trades, and accumulate capital before demanding social equality. His emphasis on vocational education, thrift, and entrepreneurship was not a concession to white supremacy, as his critics charged. It was a strategy rooted in the observation that people who own things have power, and people who do not own things do not, regardless of what rights the Constitution guarantees them on paper.

Washington’s philosophy produced measurable results. By 1900, the National Negro Business League, which he founded, had catalyzed the creation of Black-owned banks, insurance companies, and retail establishments across the South. Tuskegee graduates built homes, started farms, and entered professions at rates that defied every prediction of the white supremacist establishment. The philosophy worked. And then it was systematically discredited — not by its failure, but by the success of a competing narrative that positioned government intervention, rather than self-reliance, as the primary vehicle of Black advancement.

The Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. Du Bois debate has been reduced in popular memory to a simple binary: Washington the accommodationist versus Du Bois the militant. This is a caricature that serves the interests of those who prefer that Black Americans not examine too closely the self-reliance tradition that Washington represented. Du Bois was brilliant. His contributions were enormous. And his model — which emphasized political agitation, higher education for a “Talented Tenth,” and institutional advocacy — became the dominant model of Black advancement for the next century. But it is worth noting what that century produced: an extraordinary expansion of legal rights coupled with a persistent and widening economic gap. The rights that Du Bois’s model secured are real and precious. The wealth that Washington’s model might have generated remains theoretical — not because the model was wrong, but because it was abandoned.

“I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.”
— Booker T. Washington

The Modern Intellectual Tradition

Thomas Sowell, who has been writing about economics, race, and culture for more than five decades, is arguably the most important Black intellectual in America. He is also among the most ignored — not because his arguments are weak, but because they are strong, and because they challenge the ideological consensus that has governed Black political thought since the 1960s. Sowell’s work — Black Rednecks and White Liberals, Discrimination and Disparities, A Conflict of Visions — applies rigorous economic analysis to questions that are usually discussed in purely moral or political terms, and his conclusions are devastating for the progressive orthodoxy.

Sowell has documented, with exhaustive empirical evidence, that the economic progress of Black Americans was more rapid before the expansion of the welfare state than after it. That minimum wage laws, ostensibly designed to help low-income workers, disproportionately harm Black teenagers by pricing them out of entry-level employment. That affirmative action in higher education produces “mismatch” effects that decrease Black graduation rates at elite institutions. That the cultural factors that drive economic success — family stability, educational attainment, savings rates, entrepreneurship — are more predictive of outcomes than the structural factors that dominate progressive analysis.

Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution fellow whose work on race and identity has earned him a National Book Critics Circle Award, has written extensively about what he calls the “bargainer’s fatigue” — the exhaustion that comes from a racial politics built on perpetual grievance rather than individual agency. Steele’s argument, developed across multiple books including The Content of Our Character and White Guilt, is that the emphasis on victimhood, while historically justified, has become a psychological trap that prevents Black Americans from fully claiming their own agency and power.

What the Polls Actually Show

Here is the paradox that no one in mainstream political commentary is willing to confront: Black Americans are significantly more conservative on social issues than their voting patterns suggest. This is not a fringe observation. It is documented in survey after survey, year after year, by the most reputable polling organizations in the country.

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 59% of Black Americans said religion was “very important” in their lives, compared to 41% of all Americans. Black Americans attend religious services at higher rates than any other racial group. On the question of abortion, Black Americans hold views that are notably more conservative than the Democratic Party platform: a 2022 Pew survey found that only 55% of Black adults said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to the nearly unanimous support for abortion rights among Democratic elected officials. On questions of gender identity, school prayer, and the role of faith in public life, Black Americans consistently express views that are closer to the Republican platform than to the Democratic one.

On economic issues, the picture is more nuanced but no less revealing. A 2020 Gallup poll found that 29% of Black Americans identified as conservative, compared to 25% who identified as liberal. The remaining plurality identified as moderate. A separate survey found that 41% of Black Americans supported school choice programs, including vouchers and charter schools — a position that aligns with conservative education policy and conflicts directly with the Democratic Party’s alliance with teachers’ unions. On crime and policing, a 2021 Gallup survey found that 81% of Black Americans wanted the same or more police presence in their neighborhoods — a finding that contradicts the “defund the police” movement that was endorsed by some Democratic politicians and activists.

What these numbers reveal is a population whose values are significantly more ideologically diverse than its voting behavior suggests. Black Americans are not a monolith. They are not uniformly liberal. They hold a range of views on social, economic, and cultural issues that, in any other demographic group, would produce a corresponding range of voting behavior. That it does not — that 90% of Black voters consistently support the Democratic Party despite holding views that are in many cases closer to the Republican platform — is evidence not of ideological consensus but of the social enforcement mechanism that punishes dissent.

The Social Cost of Dissent

The price of expressing conservative views in Black spaces is not theoretical. It is documented, personal, and severe. Condoleezza Rice, who served as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, has spoken publicly about being called a race traitor. Clarence Thomas, regardless of one’s views on his jurisprudence, has endured racial attacks from ostensibly progressive commentators that would be considered unthinkable if directed at a liberal Justice. Tim Scott, upon announcing his presidential candidacy, was subjected to social media attacks questioning his Blackness — from people who would consider any such attack on a Black Democrat to be prima facie racism.

The pattern is consistent and revealing. When a Black person expresses conservative views, the response is not intellectual engagement. It is identity invalidation. The person is told they are “not really Black,” that they have “forgotten where they came from,” that they are “doing the work of white supremacy.” These attacks do not engage the substance of the person’s arguments. They attack the person’s right to hold those arguments while being Black. This is the enforcement mechanism, and it works with a brutal efficiency that would be the envy of any authoritarian regime: it does not need to persuade people that conservative ideas are wrong. It only needs to make people afraid to express them.

The media participates in this enforcement with a reliability that suggests coordination, though incompetence and ideological conformity are sufficient explanations. Black conservatives are routinely described in media profiles as “controversial,” “divisive,” or “provocative” — adjectives that are never applied to Black progressives, regardless of how extreme their positions may be. The framing implies that conservative views are inherently aberrant when held by Black people — that the natural, default, authentic position for a Black person is progressive, and that any deviation from this position requires explanation, justification, or diagnosis.

Self-Reliance Is the Oldest Black Value

The deepest irony of the accusation that Black conservatism is a betrayal of Black identity is that self-reliance, thrift, entrepreneurship, faith, and family — the core values of conservatism — are the oldest and most deeply rooted values in Black American culture. The Black church, the central institution of Black life for more than two centuries, is conservative in its theology, its family values, its emphasis on personal responsibility, and its relationship with the divine. The tradition of mutual aid societies — organizations like the Free African Society, founded in 1787, which provided insurance, education, and economic support to free Black communities — was an exercise in self-reliance, not government dependency. The entire philosophy of the Black self-help movement, from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century, was conservative in its essentials: we will take care of ourselves, because no one else will.

Marcus Garvey, who built the largest mass movement in Black American history with the Universal Negro Improvement Association in the 1920s, was an economic nationalist whose philosophy centered on Black ownership, Black enterprise, and Black self-sufficiency. His slogan — “Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad” — was a declaration of self-determination that had more in common with conservative nationalism than with progressive internationalism. Garvey was not a Republican in any partisan sense, but his vision of Black advancement through ownership and enterprise is indistinguishable in its essentials from the self-reliance philosophy that modern conservatives espouse.

Why Ideological Diversity Strengthens Communities

Every thriving community in human history has been characterized by internal debate, competing visions, and the productive tension between different approaches to shared problems. The Jewish American community, despite its predominantly Democratic voting pattern, maintains a vigorous internal debate between liberal and conservative factions that strengthens its advocacy and sharpens its policy positions. Indian Americans, the highest-income ethnic group in the United States, split between liberal and conservative orientations in ways that allow their community to have advocates in both parties. No successful community has ever achieved its success by requiring all of its members to think the same way.

The demand for ideological uniformity within Black America does not protect the community. It weakens it. It eliminates the internal competition of ideas that produces better solutions. It silences the voices that might challenge failing strategies. It removes the corrective mechanism that every healthy community needs — the person who stands up and says, “what we are doing is not working, and I have a different idea.” When that person is shouted down, called a traitor, and expelled from the community’s intellectual life, the community does not become stronger. It becomes more brittle, more predictable, more easily captured by the interests that benefit from its conformity.

Thomas Sowell has pointed out that the economic progress of Black Americans was most rapid during the period from 1940 to 1960 — before the Great Society, before affirmative action, before the expansion of the welfare state. During those two decades, the Black poverty rate was cut in half. Black college enrollment increased dramatically. Black homeownership rates rose steadily. This progress was driven not by government programs but by migration, education, entrepreneurship, and the kind of self-reliant striving that characterized Black communities when self-reliance was still the dominant cultural value.

Black conservatism is not asking Black Americans to become Republicans. It is asking them to think for themselves — to evaluate each policy, each candidate, each proposal on its merits rather than on its partisan label. It is asking them to reclaim the intellectual tradition that Frederick Douglass began, that Booker T. Washington developed, that Zora Neale Hurston embodied, that Thomas Sowell has spent a lifetime documenting — a tradition that says the most powerful force in Black advancement is not the government, not the party, not the protest, but the free Black individual, armed with education, discipline, and the unshakeable conviction that he or she is capable of building a life without anyone’s permission.

That conviction is not a conservative talking point. It is the founding principle of Black America. It is what the enslaved believed when they taught themselves to read in secret. It is what the freedmen believed when they built schools and churches with their own hands in the years after emancipation. It is what the Great Migration generation believed when they boarded trains north with nothing but their labor and their ambition. It is what every Black family that built wealth, started a business, raised children who went further than they did, believed. And the suggestion that this belief is a betrayal of Blackness — that self-reliance is somehow a white value being imposed on Black minds — is not merely wrong. It is a theft. It is the theft of the most powerful idea in Black history, repackaged as treason by people who benefit from keeping it buried.