...What comes through in the film is an occasional deep loneliness on the part of black conservatives who are too often ignored by conservatives and denigrated as not only Uncle Toms but also race traitors, coons, oreos, skinfolk-not-kinfolk, and half a dozen other slurs to indicate that they cannot be accepted by other black people if they deviate in ideology or party affiliation from the liberal/progressive mold and the Democratic Party. “The most hated person in America,” one interviewee says, “is a black conservative.” Yet the loneliness isn’t the last word. Most of the figures, both the famous and the non-famous ones, lament the nastiness and pressure put on them by whites and blacks alike but nevertheless are proud to stand out. A number of them describe their departure from left-liberalism and the Democratic Party as an “escape from the plantation.” The most charming character in the film is the late businessman and quondam presidential candidate Herman Cain who observes that his response to you-ain’t-black vitriol is to quote his illiterate grandfather, “I does not care.”
...Black conservatives are often accused of denying that racism or prejudice exists. This is, to put it bluntly, a lie. What they contest are the dictums that nothing has changed in America and that the problems of black people in America can all be laid at the feet of current racism and, especially, past slavery and Jim Crow. The subtitle of the film is “An Oral History of the American Black Conservative,” and there is a great deal of narrative in the film about the amazing gains of blacks from the time of Reconstruction on. While the 1619 Project wants to say that slavery is the defining aspect of America for black Americans, Robert Woodson, chairman of the 1776 Project, speaks in the film of having a realistic view of America in which the response to slavery and racism is given just as much attention as the problems. And he, like many of the other speakers, gives statistical and historical evidence that the social and financial health and mobility of black Americans was actually better during Jim Crow than after it. The speakers recount the history of black Wall Street, the Harlem Renaissance, and figures such as Booker T. Washington, who founded institutions that are still operating today to truly empower black people. The claim, Robert Woodson says, that black dysfunction is attributable slavery and Jim Crow “is a lie.”
The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
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Originally Posted by RMNIXON
