1. Never teach a current election
Some might think that teaching a course entitled “Black Conservatives and their Discontent: African Americans and Conservatism in America” during a semester of a presidential election would be something of a godsend. What discussions you could have with your class about the election and the politics of the moment in connection with conservatism! Ah, what could be said about Black conservatives voting for Donald Trump! But I had no such discussions. I assumed most Black conservatives were voting for Trump, if they survived being lectured to or even assaulted about their choice from aggrieved old White liberal women, a point Black conservatives frequently use to illustrate how White liberals and leftists will not grant the same range of political choice to Blacks as they do to themselves. Some had a bit of trouble from White Trump supporters but I suppose this was a relatively minor political hazard, which illustrates another point that some White conservatives are still not thrilled with the idea of having Black comrades. Clarence Thomas wrote an essay that touched upon this some years ago entitled “No Room at the End: The Loneliness of the Black Conservative” which can be found in Black and Right: The Bold New Voice of Black Conservatives in America (edited by Stan Faryna, Brad Stetson, and Joseph G. Conti, Praeger, 1997). Other Black conservatives have mentioned this as well in a voice that is defiant, plaintive, and self-pitying in one complex chord about being inside yet outside American conservatism. In any case, Blacks who were going to vote for Trump would have no trouble doing so, except for criticism from liberals and leftists accusing them of being race traitors, a charge tossed about so often that it is beginning to lose its sting. So, none of this fever-of-the-moment bad behavior interested me. People behaved far worse during American presidential elections in the nineteenth century. Just think of the time during the age of segregation when some segregationist would make sure that you, as a Black person, would lose your job if you tried to vote or some registration clerk would ask you to recite the entire Constitution if you wanted to register or some racist fire-breather would try to take your life if you tried to organize Black voters in some Alabama county.
I mentioned Kamala Harris in class once in passing. Donald Trump was mentioned twice, also in passing. There was no discussion at all about the election. Class time is precious and I did not want to waste it on “current events,” about which, I have always felt, nothing intelligent can be said. There is nothing I feel more overrated pedagogically than the use of current events in the classroom. Students, I am sure, might love reviving the incendiary commentary of social media. Few things depress me more than the thought of such a revival. My feeling about current events is it is hard to know even what you are looking at or experiencing. It is truly looking through a glass darkly. When I was in high school, I had to buy subscriptions (significantly discounted, to be sure, for students) to Newsweek and The New York Times for an elective I took called “Current Events.” I hated the class. I almost never read Newsweek or the Times, and earned a well-deserved D as a final grade. The teacher should have given me that grade for holding the class in such contempt. The irony was that I took the class because I thought I would earn an easy A. What I learned about myself was this: while I was very interested in what had gone on in the world, I was not terribly interested in what was happening at the moment. There are two things I fear about class discussions about current events: that they would inevitably be pointless and that the class would spin out of control or, shall I say, out of my control. I hate pointless classes where no true objective was achieved and I hate not being in control of my classes. Put another way: a class out of my control is for me, by definition, pointless. I treat a class in many ways as an autocratic director treats a film set. I do not necessarily think this is good but I am, as all people are, helpless before my own temperament.
There is nothing I feel more overrated pedagogically than the use of current events in the classroom. Students, I am sure, might love reviving the incendiary commentary of social media. Few things depress me more than the thought of such a revival. My feeling about current events is it is hard to know even what you are looking at or experiencing.
In the fall of 2016, I taught an American Culture Studies course entitled “The Making of American Conservatism Since 1932: From Herbert Hoover to the Tea Party.” Even though we discussed chapters from Phyllis Schlafly’s The Conservative Case for Trump (Regnery, 2016), there was no class session on the election itself. In the fall of 2020, I taught an African and African American Studies course entitled Barack Obama and the Idea of an African American Presidency. It was easier not to mention Trump there although we did talk about Biden quite a bit in his role as Obama’s vice president. There was no class session on the election then either. Perhaps I should be considered an auteur.
2. Never talk to your staff about a presidential election
In early September, just after the Democratic presidential nominee had been unveiled to the world as a combination of Elizabeth I, Evita Peron, and Lena Horne—the Iron Ingenue spreading joy and detesting Trump, a bit like Pippa Passes meets a lesser version of Shirley Chisholm—I had a Common Reader staff meeting with my hard-working managing editor, Ben Fulton, and my gifted staff writers, John Griswold and Jeannette Cooperman. John was back from covering the Democratic convention for TCR. It must have been near the time that historian Allan Lichtman had published his thirteen keys that predicted not only that Harris would win but by a landslide. I found this impossible to believe.
Unifying the party over differences exposed in the primary season is part of the discipline that makes a party work. It is what the lead candidate is supposed to be able to do. If you cannot do that, you have no business being a presidential candidate for a major party. When I told my staff this, they were utterly silent. They were not angry. Rather they seemed depressed.
Somehow this subject came up at the meeting and I proceeded to give the group a brief soliloquy that Harris was a weak candidate who had no better than a decent-to-good chance of winning. I explained that because she had not gone through the primary season for the nomination, she had been insufficiently conditioned for the rigors of a presidential campaign. The primaries help a candidate develop policy positions, create constituencies, hone fundraising, and generate the mental and physical stamina necessary for a presidential run. Harris had none of that. She did not know how to run a presidential campaign. I disagreed strongly with Lichtman’s point that not having a primary season was to her advantage as she had a unified party. It was precisely to her disadvantage because she was unprepared to run, as her campaign clearly revealed as it progressed. Besides, unifying the party over differences exposed in the primary season is part of the discipline that makes a party work. It is what the lead candidate is supposed to be able to do. If you cannot do that, you have no business being a presidential candidate for a major party. When I told my staff this, they were utterly silent. They were not angry. Rather they seemed depressed. I am not sure if they did not wish to argue because I am the boss or because they actually believed what I said. At any rate, I was instantly sorry I had said it. Lichtman turned out to be terribly wrong because he was, like so many other prognosticators, not making an objective prediction but expressing a wish. I was right because I was not indulging wish fulfillment but so what! I felt a bit as if I had bullied my staff by wanting to show off that I thought I was smarter than Lichtman. I never broached the subject of the election for the rest of the presidential season and I decided I never would do that again. I do not want to put my staff in that awkward position again.
3. Never simplify why Black people may vote a certain way
My wife pointed out to me that Kamala Harris suffered from the Larry Doby syndrome. A few months after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, outfielder Larry Doby became the American League’s first Black player when he joined the Cleveland Indians. Robinson debuted on April 15 and Doby on July 5. Like Robinson, Doby started out playing first base, not his natural position. Unlike Robinson, he did not play every day, and so he was under even more pressure to perform well when he did play. He experienced all the racism and pushback that Robinson did but did not get nearly the attention nor the hero worship. That is what happens when you are the second trailblazer and not the first, my wife said.
Harris was not the first woman to run for president for a major party and she was not the first Black. Obama created far more electricity, sheer excitement, and almost manic adulation than Harris could ever muster. Clinton, whatever her faults, was never questioned as being underqualified or unprepared for office as Harris was. No one doubted that Clinton could be president. Plenty of people were not convinced that Harris was qualified, as she was called, in some circles, the DEI candidate. Gaining the nomination without the usual primary competition did little to combat this notion, especially after her failure to make it even to the starting gate of the Iowa caucuses in 2020 when she started out as the best-funded candidate. There is an idea in academic circles called intersectionality, a fancy way of saying Harris was the first Black woman to run—combining race and gender into something unique or the first of its kind—but clearly that was not enough for her to win, as she did worse overall than the White man, Joe Biden, who beat Trump in 2020 and Hillary Clinton who lost to Trump in 2016 but won the popular vote. A lot of voters have not heard of intersectionality or if they have, they are not impressed by it.
Clearly, there was among Black voters, particularly Black men, less enthusiasm for Harris than there had been for Obama. Besides, as Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic, how much would being a Black woman have meant if someone like Winsome Earle-Sears, the conservative Republican lieutenant governor of Virginia, were running for the president? My guess is that among Black folk, Earle-Sears’s race nor her gender would have cut much ice. It is never just race or just gender, no matter what people say. It is how race, gender, and ideology blend or how you decide what ideology your race and gender represents.
My wife, whose sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was nearly in a paroxysm of racial and gender delirium over soror Harris’s run, thought that Harris’s interracial marriage may have dampened some Black men’s fervor for her candidacy. For those who may be skeptical of this, let us do, what my late friend Stanley Crouch called, “the flip test.” Suppose Harris had been married to a Black man. Suppose the mainstream media was going goo-goo-eyed over this Black man as the First Gentleman and as a model of masculinity as they did for Doug Emhoff. Do you think there may have been more enthusiasm for Harris from Black men as a whole with such an exemplar of Black manhood and Black marriage?
My wife, whose sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, was nearly in a paroxysm of racial and gender delirium over soror Harris’s run, thought that Harris’s interracial marriage may have dampened some Black men’s fervor for her candidacy. For those who may be skeptical of this, let us do, what my late friend Stanley Crouch called, “the flip test.”
Let us do another flip test. Suppose Barack Obama had been married to a White woman. Do you think Black women would have been nearly as enthusiastic about him, willing to run through hell in a gasoline suit to vote for him, especially in 2012 when their votes made a clear difference in his defeating Mitt Romney? Obama himself admitted that Michelle was the reason for his popularity with Blacks. He was also savvy enough at a young age not to marry interracially because he thought it would harm him if he wanted a career in politics. My mother told me she voted for Obama because he was married to a Black woman. I told her jokingly I should have run for president if that was all it took to get her vote. She did not think that was funny. I am sure my mother favored Obama as well because he was a Democrat and she was convinced that since FDR Democrats were always right on the issues. As a Depression era-kid, her views made sense. But I truly wonder if she would have voted for Obama if he had been married interracially. I wonder how she would have felt about me if I had married interracially. People like to think they vote rationally and on policy differences but I suspect that many are moved, consciously or unconsciously, by emotion and obsessions, by compulsions arising from their identity that they do not even fully understand, by the need for a president to symbolize something that may seem mundane but is not. I wonder too if I were not jealous that my mother was so taken with the Obamas representing an intact Black family when her own son offered her the same thing but she did not seem nearly so impressed with it. For a long time, I was actually secretly annoyed that she voted for Obama for that reason. I am sorry she ever told me that. She kept a picture of the Obamas on her refrigerator, not one of my family. Life is complicated, as it is said.
Because Black people vote more strongly for one party than any other demographic in America, the complexity behind that vote has never been as appreciated as it should be.
