In my early twenties, I was a black conservative. I had become disillusioned by the generational poverty, the petty crimes, the drugs, the teen pregnancies, the jealous rages, the child abuse, the senseless competition, the devaluing of education, and the constant gang violence in the communities of my childhood. Even in church, the scandals were too numerous, the pastoral greed ridiculous, the gossip obnoxious, and the hypocrisy disgusting. Despite my father’s alcoholism and physical abuse, my mother managed to love us kids and to instill in us the core values of non-violence, caring for others, getting an education, and working hard to get ahead. However, those values were contradicted almost everywhere I looked, and so I found myself relieved when she finally escaped my father and the big city for a predominately white suburban neighborhood.
For a while, we continued to make the long drive into the city to attend our black church, but eventually my mother found a white church that was close by. My brothers passed on that, but my mother and I attended together. It was my first intimate glimpse into how white “born again” Christians worshipped and lived. They accepted us without prejudice nor reservation as sisters in Christ.
I was happy to see how they embodied the same values my mother was instilling in us. And honestly, I was liking the short 90-minute Sunday Services and the single “unpressured” offering per service. I missed black gospel music but made do with Sunday night radio, my tapes, and albums. On occasion, I would visit Audrey Crouch’s church in Pacoima on a Sunday night. I traded my Sunday best and fancy hats for blue jeans because I heard that Jesus was concerned about my insides and not my outward appearance. It was the height of the Jesus Movement, so a lot of young people were flooding the church with enthusiasm and a desire to really live by Christ’ teachings. I fit right in. We flooded the Wednesday night Bible studies at The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California and then dined together afterwards at Bob’s Big Boy. The music changed from traditional hymns to conversions of popular songs into worship songs until we came up with our own genre of worship music using guitars and later entire bans.
For the first time in my life, the values my mother taught us were being reinforced outside our home. The competition for scarce resources was gone and with it the backstabbing, the theft, and the constant pull of people trying to drag me down. In high school, I was encouraged to excel in school, speak proper English, work hard, and be kind to others. I was praised and not ridiculed by my peers for doing well and being kind. I was no longer living in constant fear, and I had escaped the constant threats of crime, the police, and church gossip. Then I graduated from high school and went to USC which was a return to the city and a constant reminder of the mentality, the crime, and the violence I had escaped.
When I married, I returned to the suburbs and to the white church that had been my refuge and strength during my teenage years. It was then that things slowly began to shift in the church. I had been a Democrat since I was able to vote at 18. But all of a sudden, members of the church began talking about how the Republican Party lined up with our family values. The Republicans were the Party that freed the slaves, valued hard work, supported self-determination, and personal responsibility. They were for ridding the streets of all the criminal activity that I had witnessed as a child in the big city.
So, for a brief time I became a Republican. Then Rodney King happened. Then the OJ trial happened. I found myself seeing things differently from my white church friends who sided with the police and saw OJ as obviously guilty. A series of personal events along with graduate school challenged my thinking about the role the government had in perpetuating many of the problems I experienced in my neighborhood as a child. I had experienced school segregation and the lack of resources in our schools compared to the white schools. I experienced housing discrimination firsthand when we tried to rent apartments in a white neighborhood. I knew what it was like to have a store clerk threaten to call the police because she believed I had no right to own a credit card. I had experienced being called the “N” by a hateful person. I had experienced a maternity nurse telling me that my contractions probably didn’t hurt before seeing on the monitor that showed they were at the top of the chart. I had experienced the discrimination of teachers who tried to track my children away from rigorous reading groups and courses based solely on their skin color and not their test scores or academic record. Life was teaching me the truth about opportunities and self-determination.
I soon understood that my white church friends did not see bigotry because they were not bigots. They did not see racism because they were not racists. They did not see discrimination because they would not discriminate. They were classic projectionists. They made excuses for or denied what I was experiencing in my daily life outside the boundaries of the church walls. However, my black skin did not allow me the luxury of looking away and pretending that the systematic racism I was experiencing wasn’t being held in place by the Republican Party.
To prove I wasn’t crazy, I took a deeper dive into American history, government policies, and government resource allocations. I discovered the systems of oppression, discrimination, and white privilege that fed into the police brutality, longer prison sentences, and lack of investment in black communities. The bottom line was that this was no meritocracy. The idea of self-determination was in too many circumstances a mirage. I eventually left that politically minded, now Republican, white church and returned to being a Democrat.
From the outside, I watched the “born again” movement of my teens and early twenties become Trump supporters who completely abandoned the teachings of Christ for the hope of a tyrannical government that will force others to live by their rules and their values. It is easy to be a black conservative among them if you are an ambitious person who is also willing to ignore or work around historical oppression, white privilege, and ongoing blatant discrimination. It is probably comforting to hear people say that they never see you as a black person because your own internalized notion of what it means to be black is negative. It is even easier to be a black Republican if you buy into the evangelical judgement against abortion and gay rights and if you believe that immigration harms poor black people.
These are not the “born again” Christians I once knew. They no longer welcome the stranger but vilify immigrants. They see the poor as deserving of their poverty because they are lazy, drug addicted, immoral, and promiscuous. I’ve watched them become mean-spirited people who arm themselves with weapons, join militias, and refuse to wear masks or take vaccines during a pandemic. And of course, these are the same people who want to ban books that point out the true history of oppression, discrimination, white privilege and systemic racism in this country. They call themselves pro-life but everything they stand for is the opposite.
When I see black conservatives and black Trump supporters, I understand their frustration with the apparent failure of our black clergy, black parents, and public schools to overcome monumental hurdles and to broadly instill the values of respect for human life, brotherhood, education, and hard work in our youth. I understand the frustration with drug addiction, crime, and sexual promiscuity among people who are in survival mode. They believe our black communities are failing us apart from the systems in place to ensure failure. I understand the desire for a safe haven where you are affirmed for your ambition and hard work.
But I also understand that Republicans are not truly offering that haven; they are offering a mirage.