In this article by Dan LeRoy we take a look at bloggers who are not only conservative, but also happen to be black. The Democratic left would like you to think that there are no minority people who are also conservative or libertarian, but it is not so. Yours truly is proof of that. But in this article we get to meet some of the conservative black bloggers out there on the net who are putting out their own brand of opinion and writing which does not tow the leftist party line.
According to some recent studies minority populations are beginning to diverge in their political and cultural leanings. This is to be expected. In time any immigrant population will be affected by "regression to the mean" and tend to reflect the average of society as a whole. For minorities this means that they will tend over time to look just like the majority population in terms of political leanings as well as other social characteristics. This is, of course, bad news for Democrats who have depended on minority voting blocks being solidly Democratic. But this is changing and for the Democrats it means losing control over their most important constituency.
Avery Tooley describes himself simply as "a regular brother with some right-leaning political tendencies." In other words, he's the kind of black American that — if you listen to the Left and our self-proclaimed "black leaders" — doesn't really exist.
Yet not only is Tooley, a University of Maryland grad student, a real person, he's also sharing his conservatism with the world daily via a blog titled "Stereo Describes My Scenario." Taking its title from a lyric by hip-hop legends Public Enemy, it's a wide-ranging discussion of music and politics underlaid by a no-nonsense philosophy: "The right's focus on the individual is the only practical way" to solve the problems of black America.
Tooley isn't alone in propagating this heresy in the blogosphere, either. He's one of several black bloggers who make up The Conservative Brotherhood — a group of writers which also includes some women, like La Shawn Barber, a 37-year-old legal assistant and reformed liberal from Washington, D.C., whose own "Corner" features a Christian conservative's perspective on the issues of the day.
"I didn't really have a lot of ambitions for it. It started out as a semi-personal journal," says Barber. But after nine months of blogging and building her audience, "I almost feel like it's an obligation to stay out in the public eye."
Right-of-center black bloggers, in fact, seem to be entering that public eye almost daily. That shouldn't be a surprise, given statistics on growing Internet usage among black Americans, and the revelation that a quarter of young blacks consider themselves conservative (from an eye-opening study conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and released last month at the Democratic National Convention.)
From the veteran's perspective of Baldilocks to the playful philosophizing of Ambra Nykol, the Internet is suddenly full of great black writers whose views aren't monolithic — you'll find almost-daily disagreements about affirmative action, President Bush or the morality of gangsta rap — but instead offer a vibrant, hip-hop generation alternative to the broken record of the civil-rights establishment.
One of the most recent additions is also one of the most comprehensive: Booker Rising, a daily news clearinghouse that targets black moderates and conservatives and "seeks to counteract negativity, victimology and defeatism" in the name of the much-maligned Booker T. Washington.
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