Steve Sailer writes in 2007: A reader points out:
“I have always been amused that Kanye West, the benign rapper with the art school background and the English professor mother, is the one into trendy political grandstanding and accusing Bush of not caring about black people, whereas 50 Cent, the gangsta rapper with the South Jamaica, Queens background and the cocaine-dealer mother, is the one who makes occasionally favorable references to Bush and doesn’t think Katrina should be blamed on any people in particular.”
He also points out that in 1972, another black celebrity endorsed Richard Nixon besides Sammy Davis Jr. (who agonized for rest of his life over whether he had betrayed his people) and Wilt Chamberlain (who did not): James Brown. You can’t get any blacker culturally than Soul Brother Number One, so that gave Brown more freedom politically to be nonstereotypical.
I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions to this tendency, but it appears relevant to Barack’s Obama’s life story.
Steve Sailer writes this week: Commenter AndrewR asks:
“Tangentially, if the GOP is the “white party” then why are black Republicans always so dark?”
This isn’t a universal pattern (Colin Powell), but it’s likely true as a tendency: e.g., Ben Carson, Herman Cain, Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, etc.
Obama’s consigliere Valerie Jarrett is a fairly amusing example of the Democratic appeal to the other end of the African American color range.
Part of the explanation may have to do with colorism among African Americans.
A long time ago, I read something by Sowell about, I believe, Patricia Roberts Harris, an African-American woman who was appointed to the Carter cabinet. Sowell was annoyed by gushing coverage of Roberts Harris as a courageous campaigner against bias by skin color, since her career was facilitated by membership in exclusive organizations like the Jack and Jill Club that discriminated against blacks like Sowell whose skin color couldn’t pass the Paper Bag Test.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* The full black republicans tend to be very secure people. They don’t have the melodramatics and mental illness about identity that seems to afflict lots halfies. And liberals.
* Benjamin Jealous went on Henry Louis Gates Jr. and took a DNA test. He found out he is genetically 80 percent European. The former chairman of the NAACP is more genetically European than most Mexicans. Benjamin Jealous is more European than Eva Longoria who is 70 percent European.
* Dark black Republicans: the ones Steve mentions above; Tim Scott (really dark); Allen West; Alan Keyes; JC Watts; Armstrong Williams (mentioned by another commenter); some candidate for Congress in Arizona who lost to an atheist bisexual lady Dem (saw him on TV, thought “he’s really dark”); and James Brown was kinda sorta Republican
Average black Republicans: Condi; Michael Steele; Lynn Swann; Ken Blackwell
Light black Republicans: Powell
I guess it comes down to mulattoes gotta prove their “authenticity,” which inevitably means leftist down-with-whitey politics, whereas really dark blacks are secure in their racial identity and thus at least have the potential to think independently on matters political and cultural.
Notice how the outlier black Republican, Powell, was always on his party’s left flank, and eventually endorsed Obama on racialist grounds. (Pat Buchanan noted how Powell refused to repudiate his support of the Iraq War in his endorsement of Obama, thus making the endorsement more nakedly racial rather than political.)
Oliver Stone picked an actor, Jeffrey Wright, noticeably darker than Powell to play Powell in W.
BTW, Piyush Jindal is pretty dark, but Nimrata Haley sure isn’t — and it so happens that Jindal is the more conservative of the two. Coincidence?
* Black elite circles are monolithically Democratic, which causes Republicans to adopt an even more extreme version of affirmative action than Democrats do in order to attract black politicians.
White liberals are relatively selective, and only want to promote black politicians who are culturally white liberals. Ancestry aside, Obama is extremely, extremely white. He was right at home at Harvard, and he would be right at home in Portland, Park Slope, and Austin. That’s why white Democratic elites pushed him from state senator to president in just a few years.
White conservatives, on the other hand, are so desperate to have black politicians in their camp that they’ll promote almost anyone who has a minimum level of competency at spouting conservative platitudes. So you end up with people who look just like average black people, who memorized some lines about tax cuts, gays, and abortions and were thus vaulted to the top of the Republican party.
* Far-right economist and columnist Walter E. Williams is genuinely black. So was conservative Republican Jackie Robinson, the Hall of Fame baseball player.
* Ultra-Orthodox Jews are pretty conservative, but sometimes vote Dem in local NY elections if the Dem panders more to the ultras on welfare or something (or conveniently neglects to bring legal smackdown on the ultras for their building code violations and child molesting). The ultras are very savvy in playing politics, for such a tiny (and not-well-liked) group (but that’s Jews for you).
Modern Orthodox are mostly Republican AFAIK, and some are actual conservatives, although Joseph Lieberman and Peter Beinart are both modern ortho.
Neocon David Frum, one of very few immigration skeptic Jews in the MSM, is IIRC a secular (if ethnocentric) Jew, and married to a blonde shiksa goddess.
Neocon ogre John Podhoretz is on his second Jewess wife.
David Brooks is non-observant and married a shiksa with a very English-sounding name who “converted” to Jewishness and changed her name to sound more Jewish. They’re divorced now. Brooks’ half-racially-Jewish son serves in the IDF (maybe to prove to himself and others that he’s really Jewish).
