The politically incorrect voices lucidly represented in this book are an essential antidote to the monolithic civil rights establishment. Dinesh D'Souza Author of Illiberal Education Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute Eat your heart out, Jesse Jackson! Conti and Stetson clearly portray members of `The New Black Vanguard' who are gaining stature not because reporters rhapsodize over their rhetoric, but because their programs and ideas work! Marvin Olasky Professor of Journalism, University of Texas, Austin Senior Fellow, Capital Research Center
Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment is a compelling introduction to the ideas of black social critics who oppose the most prominent voices of black America's leadership. In their analysis of the vanguard, which provokes the ire of the civil rights establishment, J.G. Conti and Brad Stetson focus on four men: Thomas Sowell, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution who targets Marxism, the knowledge class, and entitlement programs; Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character, who discusses the experience of American blacks from an existentialist viewpoint; Robert Woodson, founder of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, the best known advocate of interior activism; and Glenn Loury, a conservative political economist at Boston University whose primary theme is the distinction he makes between the enemy without (racism), and the enemy within (dysfunctional behavior that perpetuates poverty and dependency). In speeches, in their writings, and in interviews with Conti and Stetson, these thinkers discuss how the construction of public policy has devolved into a kind of ethnic cheerleading that exalts race and ethnicity above personal character and behaviors in determinations of what is fair.
The spectrum of these critics' opinions includes neoconservative, libertarian, populist, and democratic social thought, but Conti and Stetson have identified commonalities that structure their discussion: members of the black vanguard reject the notion that racial faithfulness requires ideological homogeneity; they argue that a chilling silence has been spread around a ghetto-specific culture of poverty by black advocates who fear that such discussions will play into the hands of enemies of the black community; they maintain that racism is not a sufficient cause for black poverty and other social problems experienced by blacks; and they object on moral and pragmatic grounds the civil rights leadership's reliance on the political capital of white guilt. De-emphasizing racism as a generator of poverty, they explain the proliferation of the black underclass in other ways, including structural changes in urban economies and welfare work disincentives. In Challenging the Civil Rights Establishment, Conti and Stetson break through the ideological pretension that has overrun clear thinking and the empirical data of human experience in discussions of race and culture.
Reviews
This defense and promotion of African American conservative thought is a helpful summary of the views of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Robert Woodson, and Glenn Loury. . . . General; advanced undergraduate; graduate.—Choice
Libraries with an activist and open-minded patronage (who serve as local opinion-makers) will see some circulation of this scholarly snapshot of the current situation.—Booklist
Endorsements
The politically incorrect voices lucidly represented in this book are an essential antidote to the monolithic civil rights establishment.—Dinesh D'Souza Author of Illiberal Education Research Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
I believe that what [Conti and Stetson] have done in this book is both fascinating and helpful. Their framework for discussing the work of these four writers allows them to get at the moral substance of race relations in America as well as make the point that others only imply--that black America is indeed a diverse community. Their treatment of my work is thoughtful, sensitive, and fair.—Shelby Steele Author of The Content of Our Character
The book is notably well-written, and it is the first I know to pull together the thinking of the main black conservative writers. Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, and the others have broken the liberal mold of black thought, to the benefit of blacks and all Americans.—Lawrence M. Mead Associate Professor of Politics New York University
Eat your heart out, Jesse Jackson! Conti and Stetson clearly portray members of 'the New Black Vanguard' who are gaining stature not because reporters rhapsodize over their rhetoric, but because their programs and ideas work!—Marvin Olasky Professor of Journalism University of Texas, Austin Senior Fellow, Capital Research Center
