Rac(E)Ing To The Right: Selected Essays George S. Schuyler [Hardcover]

What a pleasant surprise to find this book. I have had an interest in black conservatives ever since discovering Thomas Sowell, who was an intellectual life preserver while I was drowning in the muck of political correctness in higher education. I discovered that George Schuyler was a pre-eminent black conservative and journalist of the early to mid-20th Century and wondered why I had not seen his name more frequently. I read his novel Black No More and was fortunate to find his out of print autobiography Black and Conservative at a used bookstore in Columbus. I thought then that someone should put together a collection of his essays and was pleased to find out that this was subsequently done.

This collection spans all of Schuyler's career and shows him at various stages of his intellectual and ideological journey. Although ending up on the right side of the political spectrum, Schuyler took a circuitous route to get there. The essays in this collection highlight Schuyler's sharp wit and rhetorical flair whether arguing from the left, right or somewhere else of his own making.

Schuyler's most well known and controversial essays are included. These include his attack against the concept of a specifically Black-American art style, his argument against the civil rights acts of the 1960s as interfering with the natural positive progress of race relations, his intense criticisms of Malcolm X and, perhaps most infamously, his equally intense criticisms of Martin Luther King, Jr.

As ignorance of history is the foundation for ignorance of the modern day, there is much to gain from reading Schuyler to place the present into proper context. For instance, it is simply ridiculous to hear Malcolm X being lauded as a "civil rights leader." In fact, Malcolm X was openly hostile towards civil rights and considered true civil rights' leaders to be sellouts. Although he later changed his tune, it was only after his period of influence was largely over, after he had left the Nation of Islam and after he changed his name from Malcolm X to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Schuyler does a good job of reminding us that perhaps Malcolm X does not deserve the good will, let alone the warm fuzzies, with which many would remember him.

Schuyler also does a good job of demonstrating that pre-1960s America was not a land of relentless racial hostility and that, while certainly a long way from utopia, much progress was being made towards the ideals of equality without the need for governmental interference. Even with respect to MLK Jr., while Schuyler may not have given King his proper due, Schuyler does make legitimate points regarding King's association with communists and reminds us that many times King's presence at protests had the deleterious effect of promoting rather than deterring violence.

My five star rating, however, should not be taken as a wholesale acceptance of Schuyler's positions. His conservatism often took a rather kooky turn and led him down some extreme paths. When William F. Buckley started to clean up conservatism to make it a more mainstream movement, numerous ideologues became marginalized and it appears Schuyler was in this group. Rather, my high rating is a tribute to Schuyler's independent thinking as well as his ability and courage to express controversial and unpopular ideas in a very articulate manner.

My rating also should not be extended to the editor of this volume. Jeffrey B. Leak's introduction does make some good points, such as suggesting that Schuyler's hard ideology and in-your-face manner might have actually slowed the development of black conservatism by making things more difficult for moderate black conservatives. Also, Leak makes an exceptionally good point that Schuyler's upper New York upbringing may have caused him to underestimate the anger and frustration of Southern blacks.

But for every hit Leak makes, there is a miss. Leak speculates that Schuyler repressed a period of incarceration for being AWOL from the military. Yet I think it is clear that Schuyler never mentioned this incarceration because, unlike the civil rights' protesters with whom he later disagreed, he considered incarceration to be a badge of shame. There was nothing repressed about it.

Perhaps most laughable is a comparison Leak makes between Schuyler and modern black author Shelby Steele. In a footnote regarding this comparison, Leak questions criticisms of affirmative action by stating that we never hear upper class whites bemoan their inherited wealth. What is this dude smoking? One only needs to step a single foot on a modern college campus to encounter white liberals suffering massive palpitations over exactly the financial class into which they were born. In fact, such white liberals argue that their own white guilt applies not only to themselves but also to me, even when they know my economic upbringing was worlds away from their own. This alone makes me seriously question Leak's analyses of other issues. (Though, on a note of fairness, Leak's position is somewhat true in that white liberals never seem willing to give up their own jobs to "promote diversity" but are more than happy to advocate that I should lose my job instead, usually done with a tone dripping with patronization. Apparently upper class white liberals feel so bad about their privileged positions that they are willing to discriminate against working class whites to assuage their emotional pain and thereafter point to the racial characteristics of the parties involved to justify their actions to themselves.) Finally, as a strictly academic matter, it is hard to take an editor seriously when one checks his footnotes only to discover that one of them, footnote 47, is simply missing.

Of course, no one is going to read this book for the editing. One will read it for the writing of George Schuyler. Agree with him or not, Schuyler will make a person think. It is a shame, and a statement of our times, that his name is not much better known.

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