Coronado racism, Frenchie, A Dream Deferred...

Hey,

Hope you are enjoying the last days of summer. We just got back from a successful trip to Coronado, which is just off the San Diego coast. The weather was absolutely perfect for the beach but we had work to do.

Just over two years ago, the Coronado High School basketball team won the state championship only to have it stripped because of an alleged racial incident. The news went viral and I admit I was one of the Americans that bought into the narrative of “white” Coronado High threw tortillas at “hispanic” Orange Glen High. When I learned that the narrative was wrong, I spent five days investigating and here is the resulting Fox News article and documentary, “Rush to Judgment”:

We did not return to repeat the story but to investigate the white guilt angle of what happened. The championship game ended around 9:30 PM on Saturday and less than 12 hours on Sunday morning, Father’s Day, the school board slammed the basketball players as “perpetrators” and labeled them “racist, classist, and colorist.” The question for us is why did the school board and other authorities refuse to give these players due process? Were the adults afraid of being labeled racists and is that why they chose to smear the kids? Also, what does it mean for society to have kids work hard and come together as a team only to have their merit stripped away by ideologues?

Left: Shelby interviewing Coronado High Parent, Gerri Manchin, while shamelessly getting a massage. Right: Robert Couts, father of a Coronado High basketball player. (We also interviewed Jim Fabiszak, but forgot to get a photo.)

What made this trip special was that it was the first time I got to bring Lena the Frenchie along. She enjoyed it but kept wondering why she wasn’t allowed to go to the beach. :)

If you haven’t seen it yet, Quillette came out with an article, “A Dream Deferred Revisited,” about my father written by Samuel Kronen. He choose to focus on my father’s most overlooked book, “A Dream Deferred,” and the surprise was how relevant the book is to today — yes, even we can forget things close to the family:

“What, in fact, is a black conservative?” Steele asked. “Well, he is not necessarily a Republican, or free-market libertarian, or religious fundamentalist, pro-lifer, trickle-down economist, or neocon. I have met blacks in all of these categories who are not considered conservatives.” The term itself is something of a misnomer. As a consequence of America’s racial history and the triangulation of forces that opened the door to black freedom in the 1960s, Steele observed, the liberal-conservative axis is somewhat different for blacks than it is for other Americans. Because anti-racist activism gave rise to the Civil Rights movement and liberated blacks from second-class citizenship, black Americans had become tethered to a specific form of politics and activism that focuses exclusively on their group’s historical victimization at the expense of other forces and factors:

Certainly, no explanation of black difficulties would be remotely accurate were it to ignore racial victimization. On the other hand, victimization does not, in fact, explain the entire fate of blacks in America, nor does it entirely explain their difficulties today. It was also imagination, courage, the exercise of free will, and a very definite genius that enabled blacks not only to survive victimization but also to create a great literature, expand and deepen the world’s concept of democracy, influence popular culture around the globe, and so on. No people with this kind of talent, ingenuity, and self-inventiveness would allow victimization to so singularly explain its fate unless it had become a primary source of power.

What makes someone a black conservative is not a denial of white racism or black suffering, but a refusal to draw a straight causal line between the two. “Very simply, then, a black conservative is a black who dissents from the victimization explanation of black fate when it is offered as a totalism—when it is made the main theme of group identity and the raison d’être of a group politics.” A person can be liberal or progressive on policy issues and still be considered a black conservative if he dissents from the prevailing racial contract of majority guilt/shame and minority rage/indignation over past injustice.

Lastly, I was asked to be on the Dangerous Speech podcast with Obaid Omer several weeks ago where we talked about everything from the White Guilt film to my life. Here is the link if you wish to listen.

A big thank you to all of you who have signed up for this substack page and have sent us letters of encouragement. We may not respond to every one but we are reading them and truly appreciate it.

Be well,

Eli