Movement That Didn't Move

TWO YEARS ago, the October issue of Newsweek heralded a band of conservative Black intellectuals. It was one of many tributes to what appeared to be a challenge to the traditionally liberal leadership of the Black community. Today, that challenge has fizzled.

Then, with the civil rights leadership contending with an increasingly antagonistic Reagan administration, it looked as if inroads cut in the late 1970s by Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell would allow other conservative Black voices to be heard. In the years following Sowell's first publications, comrades emerged: Walter E. Williams, a George Mason University economist, Robert L. Woodson, head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, and most visible of all, Kennedy School Professor of Political Economy Glenn C. Loury.

By the early 1980s, this group was questioning the notion that racism is an adequate explanation for the disparities between Black and white achievement. The group members attacked not only affirmative action and busing, but also civil rights leaders like Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP, who they said had a personal interest in policies that had proven themselves ineffective.

But the conservatives failed to meld their specific attacks into a true critique of prevailing Black liberal culture. Consequently, their best arguements have been appropriated by a Black liberal establishment that shows signs of new vitality.

THE CONSERVATIVES organized around the nation that slavery's most damning legacy is not white racism but the psychological crippling of Blacks who lack the pride necessary to compete. "A central theme in Afro-American political and intellectual history is the demand for respect, the struggle to gain inclusion within the civic community, to become co-equal participants in the national enterprise," Loury wrote in a 1985 New Republic article.

Loury's compelling call for the Black community to look inward for solutions to its problems has gained currency on the national scene--but not to the benefit of conservatives. Jesse Jackson has become the undisputed leader of Blacks partly on the strength of his call for young Blacks to recognize that despite their disadvantages they are "somebody." And it was a progressive Black sociologist, William Julius Wilson, who built a top academic career on arguments that racism fails to account for Black exclusion in America. His analysis has a strong class component.

LACKING critical theorists, playwrights, or critics of the arts, the cohort dominated by public policy economists has found a comfortable but confining role within the broader conservative movement. The conservatives have not fulfilled Harold Cruse's requirement of two decades ago, that Blacks develop their own, complete, "cultural nationalism."

Instead, the conservatives write analyses of tuition tax credit proposals, critiques of desegregation plans and polemics against mainstream civil rights leaders in journals such as The New Republic and Commentary, outlets intended for white, often Jewish, audiences.

Harvard's Government Professor Martin Kilson, a leading interpreter of Black intellectual life, speaks of the movement Sowell founded as an "important cross-roads in the life cycle" of Black intellectuals that has broadened the debate permissible within their ranks.

YET CHARGES of "Tomming" continue to be levelled against Blacks who propound conservative ideas. Williams, for instance, says he and the other conservatives suffer "a lot of ostracizing" by other Black academics. Indiana Law School Professor John T. Baker's last minute decision not to testify in favor of Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court also suggests that the broadening of debate Kilson senses has not come about.

The only Black lawyer slated to testify for Bork, Baker's change of mind following conversations with a Black aide to Senator Howard Metzenbaum drew national attention. While it's unknown exactly why Baker decided not to testify, Williams speculates that the reason has to do with expected negative reaction by other Blacks. Baker, Williams said, "may feel that the issue is not worth the sacrifice in social contacts and ostracism."

"The social contacts are not increasing," continued Williams, who said Black liberals nonetheless recognize the relevance of conservative ideas. "The so-called Black liberals see that the solutions they've been calling for are not working," Williams says. "So now they use the term self-help. They're talking about the devastating affects of crime. They're saying things that couldn't have been said before we came along."

Now that Black liberals are telling such family secrets, though, the question facing Williams and his fiends is what's left for Black conservatives to do.