One of the delegates to the GOP Convention from AZ is a young man by the name of
Paris Dennard. Paris is keeping a
delegate diary of his experience. You can certainly note the fine Public Relations training at Pepperdine in his writing and in the various interviews he has done.
This isn't young Paris' first convention, despite his youth. He actually
was the blackface and
had a speaker's slot at the 2000 convention, when he was only 17 years old. At the time, he was the Chairman of the Arizona Teenage Republicans. Later he became the President of the Pepperdine College Republicans. In fact, the extent of Paris' political involvement and public advocacy of his chosen party's principles make him a budding political professional. In Paris, we can see the birth of the next generation of black Republican leadership and its role in the GOP.
Paris' life story and his choices can tell us a lot about the future of African-Americans, and minorities in general, in the GOP. Paris grew up in modest circumstances with a single mom and dedicated grandparents. Despite their struggles, Paris is proud to claim that his mother never went on welfare, as if that were a mark of shame. But all is not ideologically harmonious with young Paris. Despite his undoubted convictions about self-reliance and the evils of government-sponsored support programs, and his party's position on racial preferences, Paris accepted a racially exclusionary merit scholarship which Republicans are trying to eliminate.
So why, despite the bigotry and intolerance flowing just below the GOP's surface, and despite the undeniable impact of its economic and social policies on people of his race, does Paris support W and the GOP? Paris said:
"I just won't allow people to box in a Republican. I won't allow people to box in what a Republican looks like, sounds like or feels like. I think George W. Bush did an excellent job when he said there's a compassionate conservatism that comes out. People said George W. Bush didn't sound like a Republican when he said I want to, you know, get rid of the soft bigotry of low expectation. Traditionally, does that sound like a Republican?"
Yes, in fact, it sounds like a familiar refrain. Something darker and more atavistic lies behind the minority Republicans' confident pronouncements of ideological identification. Black republicans, like social conservatives, are attracted to the GOP by the same strategy: cultural backlash.
Social conservatives have been convinced to ignore economic reality and vote against their self interest with the carrot of conservative policy changes which always hangs just out of reach, and by manipulation of their rage against a culture which denigrates their values - the myth of a liberal media and elite who despise them. Minorities are being baited with the same lies. They are told that the liberal establishment, embodied by affirmative action, racial preferences, social and economic programs which knit together a safety net against falling out of the American dream, are nothing more than a war against the self-esteem, self-reliance, and individual worth of minority citizens. These things are not a boon to you or community, they are holding you back in a culture of dependence, and a stereotype of mediocrity you don't deserve. As Paris put it, minority Republicans are encouraged to go to war against "the soft bigotry of low expectation."
So long as the outrage against the perceived insult of being thought less capable because of your race can be fanned, talented and proud minority citizens will heed the call. It is more difficult to maintain minority Republicans' attention on their rage and keep it off of real issues. It is hard to hide the numbers of minority men in our prisons. It is hard to hide the stark disparities in wealth and opportunity between minorities and whites. It is hard to hide the disparate impact so many social ills have upon minority communities, from crime and violence, to AIDS and other health risks, to environmental pollution. It is hard to hide the fact that so many of these real crises in minority communities are rooted in historical discrimination and perpetuated by the very entrenched economic interests that the GOP champions so diligently. So minorities fall away when the scales fall from their eyes.
So too, perhaps, might young men like Paris, possibly even Paris himself, turn away from the GOP. Minority adherents to the GOP like Paris are soldiers in a very ugly and cynical cultural war. We cannot assume they will realize for themselves that they are on the wrong team, even the brightest peoples' judgement can be impaired when they perceive themselves to be the focus of bigotry. The attitudes of Paris and other minority conservatives are a barometer for how well we are doing in communicating with minority voters and in recognizing and following our own minority leaders.
Paris could be an anomaly - blackface for the GOP - or he could be the vanguard of a movement. With demographic trends as they are, the GOP clearly understands that they must make inroads into minority communities or face becoming a permanent minority party. Social conservatives are a growing segment of a shrinking population. The cultural war which has brought the GOP the spoils it now enjoying must open a new front to sustain the power of the wealthy and privileged: Paris is that new battlefield.
There is no doubt that the African-Americans who are attracted to the Republican party are very capable and idealistic people. Paris seems like the sort of hard-working and ambitious young man who would get ahead and thrive in any milieu. Paris is a natural leader and, no doubt, a persuasive and passionate advocate for his views. Those very qualities are what make him vulnerable to the blandishments of the GOP's minority culture war. They also make him and other minority men and women like him vulnerable to something else which requires intelligence and self-discipline: the truth.
The facts will set them free. Progressive leaders, including minorities, have to make a more persuasive case that the disadvantage and deficits that minority communities and individuals suffer is not a result of lack of merit, but rather of a design of both historical and contemporary origin to slip them the short end of the stick. Further, measures to remedy those injustices are not the result of guilt, or condescension, but the demands of the American value of equity. Redress of these continuing handicaps is not a claim to entitlement by those to weak to compete fairly, but a demand for justice by those who have borne injustice and fought free of it to take their place as equals in society in all ways. The myth that there is a distinction between equality of opportunity (which is supposedly Conservatively Correct to the GOP) and equality of outcomes (which is the root of all evil - the quota) must be exploded. If minority citizens are in every way the equal of other citizens (which they are) equality of opportunity will result in equality of outcomes.
Minorities obviously do not have equal outcomes in today's America. Any shortfall in equality of outcomes must indicate that there is NOT an equality of opportunity, unless you accept that there is something wrong with minority citizens, or with their culture. This is the second prong of the GOP's culture war attack on minorities. The myth they want to sell is that since minority citizens have perfect equality of opportunity (a fallacy supported by the lack of any 'official' discrimination against them), their failure to achieve equal outcomes is due to a flaw in their character. That flaw is the dependency culture, the "soft bigotry of low expectations," that has been forced upon them by liberal America. In short, it is not the continuing disabilities to your opportunity the social and economic systems impose upon you which cause your poor outcomes, it is your belief that those disabilities should be removed. Only when you just stop fighting for equal opportunity will you be able to achieve equal outcomes.
What complete poppycock. But it is convincing even to some of the best among us, as young Paris Dannard demonstrates.
The Author's blog is: Blog For Arizona.