The Foundations of African American Conservatism

African American conservatism is far from simply a modern, contemporary political project. Similarly to other forms of conservatism, African American conservatism cannot be understood without reference to its historical roots, sociological context, and philosophical foundations. The African American culture has its roots in the transatlantic slave trade, which resulted in the combination of a variety of West African tribes melded together in the furnace of the experience of American slavery. Historical records demonstrate that Africans brought from the western coast of Africa had a variety of affiliations, religious traditions, and sociocultural statuses, all of which influenced the nascent and developing African-American experience. 

However, those experiences alone do not constitute the entirety of the foundation of what we now call African American culture. African American culture is a distinctly Western culture—the combination of the West African experience with the American South. African Americans were baptized into Christianity almost as a collective. With notable exceptions, a vast majority adopted various Protestant Christian spiritualities and theological opinions. To this day, African Americans are amongst the most religious Americans. These beliefs had an immense influence on African American cultural and political life. Figures like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were deeply religious figures whose moral convictions about justice, liberty, and economic opportunity we’re both deeply Christian and fundamentally American in the most dynamic sense. Despite the experience of being enslaved and denied fundamental human and constitutional rights, these figures never regarded the core promises of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as being barriers to their flourishing. Quite the opposite. These figures rather implored the United States to expand its blessings of liberty and justice to all the human persons within its borders, believing that these principles provided a critical framework for the success of African Americans as an ethnic experience. This is why these two figures are often cited as something like the great grandfathers of African American conservatism.

A distillation of the thoughts of these figures also provides the grounding for all of contemporary African American conservatism to come after. These core principles are a respect for constitutional rights, economic opportunity through private enterprise, the importance of religion in social life, and the importance of intermediary institutions in furthering the common good. An astute observer would recognize in all of these principles a strong similarity to other strains of American conservatism. This is natural because African American conservatism is, precisely, an American conservatism. The unique position of African-American’s vis-à-vis these goals comparable to other American conservatives, however, persists precisely due to the location of African-Americans in social and political life in the United States. Due to beginning with a fundamental lack of constitutional rights, fighting for constitutional protections was something that was both progressive and conservative. Progressive, in that there was a passion for change and society’s development, and conservative, in that the change sought was a realization, extension, and embrace of the core promises at the heart of the nation. 

In the life of Booker Talifero Washington, we see a person who embodied this tension. Washington was far from blind to the condition of African-Americans emerging from slavery and tirelessly labored to see a change in their condition as a people. Washington was deeply convinced that the path to a successful emancipation would be the widening of the economic base through practical education of all people, technical skill-building, wealth creation, character development, and a collaborative approach to “race relations.” Taking matters into his own hands, he built institutions dedicated to bringing about the ends he sought. He opposed racism and discrimination with a positive, hopeful vision for the future without robbing the agency of the people. In his time, Washington advanced an agenda for African-Americans that retains its force and power even to the present-day. Washington’s work is a template and building block in advancing an African-American conservatism in the present.