Friday, January 28, 2005

Not Right Enough Blacks in America


To this day, I can never convince myself to believe that people of African descent, living in America, could ever really fit the glove of Republican conservatism.
Someway or another token African-American right-wing pundits fall short of white conservative standards. In the same breath, they tend to betray their own historical legacy, while satisfying their own socio-economic power structure on the surface level.

Some examples that immediately come to mind are Alan Keyes, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powel and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The most recent example is conservative columnist Armstrong Williams who's recently come under fire, particularly from fellow right-wingers, for acknowledging that his company accepted $240,000 from the Bush administration to promote his No Child Left Behind law to Black audiences and giving the education secretary air time.

The repercussions of Williams's failure to promote the notion of media neutrality from the government interests, is the suspension of his weekly newspaper column by Tribune Media Services. The recent instance of mainstream media's conflict of interest speaks to the argument for the masses to challenge the popular tendency to blindly ingest corporate media's without critically examining its reporting sources.

Another issue that begs for examination is the proverbial pink elephant standing in our living room-the Black Republican.

How exactly do Black Republicans come to terms with the notion that right-wing conservatives serve their best interests? I welcome any Republicans of color to chime in of course.
I just don't see how a people with such an extensive American history of political, psychological, and socio-economic oppression from Puritanical Anglo-Saxon conservatives, can detach that history from every other oppressed group in modern day America.