Between Black and Right

By Makani Themba-Nixon, ColorLines. Posted March 1, 2005.

After you climb the rickety steps of my grandparents' Roxbury duplex, past the red, rusty porch swing, you are greeted with an old doormat emblazoned with the U.S. flag, a grimacing eagle, and the words, THESE COLORS DON'T RUN.

Inside is much like any other home of their generation. Dark wood paneling, artificial flowers arranged on mantels and around picture frames, and over an old, three-knobbed stereo, there is a velvet painting of Dr. Martin Luther King and the two assassinated Kennedy brothers. Save for the color television and the digital cable, little has changed in that house for more than 40 years.

For me, it is this place more than any other that represents the long tradition of black conservatism in this country. It is this house, where my father was raised the adopted son of a South Carolina-born preacher, that spawned the pain and politics that made him the cog of the religious right he is today. And if we, on the left, are to truly understand the increasing number of African Americans joining their ranks, we will have to go back a lot further than this election.

I Am a Man

This plaintive cry of the civil rights movement made famous during the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike sums up the crossover politics of the black Christian right. And metaphorically speaking, it's a pretty accurate summary of the base politics of the Christian right overall. My father, like many of his generation, negotiated between the clear-cut (and often violent) discipline of the church and a world of rapid change. In the Boston of the late 1950s and early '60s, my father had opportunities his parents never had – college, access to a previously segregated profession and a sense of upward mobility made possible by the civil rights movement in the South and the North. He also faced a subtle racism his parents never understood. My grandparents lived with a racism under which there was the constant awareness of physical threat and circumscription. For them, this new racism felt like freedom, and there was no excuse for failure in the "space" it provided.

Yet, my father found success elusive. As a black engineer, he was often the last hired and first fired due to budget cuts or what white colleagues termed his "arrogance." Between sporadic employment and the advances of the women's movement, it was increasingly difficult to have the "traditional" marriage my father idealized. As a result, his backlash against feminism and women's rights was thoroughly fierce.

He had plenty of company. For him and his friends, white women had gotten out of line ahead of black men in the quest for human dignity. Even black (male-led) "liberation" organizations articulated victory in terms dangerously close to Leave It to Beaver in blackface. In this context, it was easy to appear "progressive" under the rubric of the black nationalism of the early 1970s. For my father and others like him, it was a struggle for coronation, not liberation.

As the '70s came to a close and the Reagan era took hold, there was growing public bitterness about the hard-won legal infrastructure to protect minorities, women and children. Jail time for spousal abuse (though more often imposed on poor batterers of color than rich, white ones), affirmative action, choice, rights for sexual minorities and restrictions against racial slurs were all among the targets of the emerging right. When AIDS hit the country full-blown in the mid-1980s, it was the "sign" conservative Christian forces needed to assert that without Jesus (as they remade Him), the nation was going to hell in a handbasket. The generation that "turned on and tuned out" 20 years before was looking for order and stability for their families. They wanted rules and an "operating system" that steered clear of the troubling ambiguity of the times.

After a journey that included stints at atheism and even Judaism, my father returned "home" to the church of his youth. By the early '90s, he felt "the calling" and became a Baptist minister like his father. Church, as he would often say, provided an "operating manual" for his life. It gave him a comforting sense of order where good was rewarded, evil was punished, and he had clear dominion over his world.

Makani Themba-Nixon is executive director of The Praxis Project, a nonprofit media and policy advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.

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