“Most conservatives like to think that they have principles that are color-blind: the eternal verities and such. I think this is a kind of self-flattery that excuses historical ignorance on our part. Enslavement stripped Africans of their ethnicities, their languages, and their religion. That means more than any one other group in this country African-Americans are a people created by the history of our nation and its politics: commerce, slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, ... the civil rights movement. It is a naïveté bordering on psychosis to suggest that black politics should conform to some imagined color-blind set of principles.”
MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY is a writer living in Mount Kisco, New York. He is National Correspondent for The American Conservative. His work has appeared in ESPN Magazine, New York Times Magazine, The Washington Monthly, The Awl, the Guardian, and ComedyCentral.com.