Black Republicans, according to Deborah Toler, writing for publiceye.com, represent the bourgeoisie of African American society who, like the bourgeoisie of other societies in history, hold negative stereotyping views of their poor and underprivileged. According to Deborah Toler, the conservative Black Republican ideology, which ascribes the failure of the black underclass to their lack of collective merit ("negative cultural value"), may be considered an old ideology which finds its ultimate origins in the capitalist bourgeoisie of Old England Industrial Revolution, with its teeming mass of wretchedly poor and ruthlessly exploited working class.
According to Eric Hobsbawm, in his, Age of Capital, in the typical pattern of the self-serving bourgeoisie way of thinking, the social and economic superiority of a privileged class implies the inferiority of the other in terms of personal virtues and merit.
Black liberals often describe Black conservatives as self-loathing. Black conservatives typically, vehemently, deny this imputation; yet, it may be argued that the Black conservative reveals his loathing of his kind and their failure by his demeaning stereotyping of them. The Black conservative's arguments against affirmative action, may be considered to reveal his anxiety about favorable assessment of his worth by the white world, for affirmative action would seem to demean his personal success and lower his personal merit, thus imputing the failure of his kind to him also; a personal humiliation he seeks to avoid by identifying with the values of the dominant white culture and excelling in the terms it dictates to him.
According to Eric Hobsbawm, in his Age of Capital, for the typical bourgeois, self-congratulating in personal success, the absence of success in the other is evidence of lack of merit. But today, the "disreputably poor" of Britain's nineteenth century, whose bourgeois superiors characterized as "drunken, licentious disreputable masses" have been largely absorbed into the middle class, not because of any prior revolution in personal merit attributes, but because the inflow of wealth into Britain during the era of overseas imperial expansion generated sufficient improvement in the social and economic climate to empower the poor to help themselves out of the miseries of poverty.
Michael Eric Dyson in his, Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind? comments critically on Bill Cosby's infamous "Pound Cake Speech," during a May 2004 NAACP award ceremony in Washington D.C. In Michael Eric Dyson's opinion, Bill Cosby's speech is a classic example of how the relatively economically uplifted of society tend to a condescension in which they characterize their poor as lazy, immoral, prone to criminality, and fail to appreciate not only that the social and economic circumstance of the poor underclass determines their "demoralization," but also that what the poor need is not self-righteous sermonizing from the rich but practical help. The poor, according to Dyson, and other African American intellectuals who share his views, don't need grandddad Cosby sermons, for what a billionaire sermoner sees as "negative cultural attitudes" of the black underclass are attributes common to the poor and underprivileged in all history, so it is unfair to seek to label any population or group of the poor as though such traits apply to them in any exclusive way. The poor and underprivileged–black, white, yellow or brown–always seem culturally and morally decadent from the perspective of their superiors. The privileged, Dyson argues, effectively stand cause and effect on its head–the poor, according to the theory of poverty peculiar to the privileged classes, remain poor because they lack the virtues of their economic superiors.
This way of thinking about the poor underclass, which Black liberals decry, and which consists in blaming the poor for their condition, and conveniently absolves the privileged of responsibility for their underprivileged, is reflected in a black conservative contribution to a forum debate , A Black Conservative responds to James Thindwa:
If you leave the ghetto and live in communities that don't have a history of segregation, because they were built after the Civil Rights Movement, then you have eliminated the very tallest walls that hold blackfolks back. There is no legacy of slavery in Cerritos, CA, the home of Tiger Woods. It was built after Jim Crow was defeated. If you refuse to leave the ghetto, then it's your fault.
Herman Cain
This seems the crudest summary of the black conservative view of their fellows possible. It explains the economic disadvantage of black underclass by resorting to negative stereotyping of an entire social class. And its logic seems to suggest that social and economic class distinction is the primary element in the mechanism of evolution of racist ideology. Where social and economic class distinction coincides with the fault-line of race and ethnic identity, biological racist ideology springs up to justify it. Where social and economic class distinctions have no accompanying ethnic or racial boundaries to its incidence, sociological equivalent of Darwinian race ideologies emerge. Both Deborah Toler and Michael Eric Dyson agree that the widening social, economic and cultural gap between Black bourgeoisie and the black underclass is literally crystallizing into an alienation of both classes in pre-desegregation America. In the comment above, we confront the shockingly sobering irony of a black man having risen to the social and economic status of the dominant white group now seeing the poor of his own race in exactly the same ideological terms as racist whites.
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According to poll studies of African American population, most ordinary Black conservatives are social conservatives whose views are influenced by the Judeo-Christian heritage. Many African American conservatives are Evangelical Christians who are, at least, regular churchgoers and whose convictions, influenced by Church teaching, brings them in to congruence with white conservatives on social issues. They oppose homosexuality, same-sex marriage and oppose abortion rights, at least in principle. The religious among them would support Christian prayers and religious worship in school, and the agenda of the religious Right to "win America back to God." The Black community as a whole has no quarrel with social conservatism. The hostility of the majority in the African American society is reserved mostly for a minority of African American conservatives whose brand of conservatism appears to echo the political views of conservative and neoconservative whites based on racist ideology..
The Black "bourgeois" according to Toler, only hold conservative political and economic views typical of people of their class worldwide and, thus, they find conducive environment for their conservative right wing political and economic views in the Republican party. A circumstance which produces what, to most liberal Blacks, is the mind boggling anomaly of a black man aligning with racist whites in negative stereotyping of their own race. Thus, to a large extent, the political-ideological conflict in African American society is less a conflict of conservatives and liberals, in the general sense in which you find it in white American society, than a conflict of Black Democrat majority holding liberal political and economic policy views and a Black Republican minority with typical bourgeoisie conservative political and economic policy leanings informed by an ideology which blames the poor and underprivileged for their condition and thus absolves society and government of responsibility for them in a wholly laissez fairez, market driven economy.
Michael Steele
