The First'Black Conservative'?(Review)

Rac[e]ing to the Right, by George S. Schuyler (Tennessee, 224 pp., $27.50)

It is hard to think of anyone who is, or has been, a black conservative, in the full sense of the word "conservative." Most of those who are called black conservatives are certainly not interested in preserving the status quo. That status quo includes welfare, failing schools, quotas, and separatism that most black conservatives deplore and attack. Still less are they seeking to return to some status quo ante, such as the Jim Crow era. The term "black conservative" has come to be used very loosely to refer to those who are opposed to the liberal-left vision and policies on racial issues.

In that sense, George Schuyler (1895-1977) may well have been the first black conservative intellectual, as well as one of the best. Booker T. Washington may come to mind as a predecessor, but the founder of Tuskegee Institute was primarily an educator, rather than someone who made his living from his writings, as Schuyler did. Moreover, the circumspection that marked Booker T. Washington's words, during a particularly bitter and dangerous time for black Americans, was nowhere to be seen in Schuyler's later witty, cutting, and brutally honest writings that took no prisoners. His novel, Black No More, devastatingly satirized the black leaders of the 1920s and 1930s, including W. E. B. DuBois.

George Schuyler never lost his zest for puncturing cant and taking blowhards down a peg, whether in his left-wing youth or in his conservative older years, when he attacked the likes of Malcolm X and exposed the Communists as people whose gulags held more slave laborers at one time than were imported into the Western Hemisphere over a period of centuries.

Consistently out of step with the times and the object of bitter hatred, Schuyler sometimes wrote with a gun by his typewriter. But he accepted hostility and controversy as going with the territory. He said, "I like nothing better than a Pier Six brawl with no holds barred." But George Schuyler was more than just an explosively controversial journalist. A recently published collection of his writings, entitled Rac[e]ing to the Right, shows a man very well informed about his own times, and far beyond the realm of race, as well as very knowledgeable about history and its implications. He also traveled widely across the United States and in Europe, Africa, and Latin America.

The era in which Schuyler was a journalist, novelist, and man of letters stretched from the 1920s through the 1960s-crucial decades that saw major transformations of American racial history. His insights were always enlightening, even if his conclusions were not always easy to agree with. Indeed, he did not always agree with himself over this long span of time when he migrated ideologically from the Socialist party in 1921 to the staunchly ...