Abstract
There was a period before Obama’s election when former national GOP chairman Michael Steele could be taken more seriously than the mainstream media now does and when the Republican Party appeared to be slowly progressing in a strategy to whipsaw traditional progressive black politics between the currents of race solidarity on the one hand and a supposed untapped affinity to conservative principles on the other. This is no longer the case. Consider this stark irony: 2010 produced the largest bumper crop of black Republican candidates since Reconstruction, many of them inspired by Obama’s election as the first African American president.2 Yet the election of Obama, a Democrat, as the first black president presages the consolidation of black support for the Democratic Party for years to come. Black Republicans are largely to blame.
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Notes
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© 2012 Terry Smith
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Smith, T. (2012). Black Tea: Black Conservatives and the Rhetoric of Social Conservatism. In: Barack Obama, Post-Racialism, and the New Politics of Triangulation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372016_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230372016_4
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