Wall Street Journal - On Being Black and Conservative

Wall Street Journal

OPINION

THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW

On Being Black and Conservative

The Heritage Foundation’s president on the racial progress she’s experienced, the problems that remain, and becoming a target of Fox host Tucker Carlson.

By Nicole Ault

September 25, 2020

Chandler Junior High School in Richmond, Va., admitted its first two black students in 1960. A year later 30 entered the school, one of whom was seventh-grader Kay Coles. Now known as Kay Coles James, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, she remembers students pricking her with pins and a teacher making a remark about “brownies.”

“This country has changed, and I have witnessed that change,” Mrs. James, 71, says in a phone interview nearly 60 years later. Mrs. James, who as a teenager participated in a march after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, sympathizes with those Black Lives Matter protesters who are “genuinely grieving and heartbroken about how race is being handled in our country today.”

That view has drawn some fire from the right. In a May 30 FoxNews.com op-ed she asked: “How many more black people must die, and how many more times will statements of sympathy have to be issued?” She argued that “racism is still a problem in this country” and exhorted readers to “speak up and reject the racism and division in their own communities. . . . Racial equality is something that every one of us, regardless of skin color, must work toward on a daily basis.”

Fox host Tucker Carlson accused her of writing a “long screed denouncing America.” She responds tactfully, noting that she respects Mr. Carlson’s journalism. “It was disappointing,” she says, “that he did not know me well enough to know that I would never call America a racist nation—that he read that somehow as a screed. I thought it was a very thoughtful thing that both acknowledged that there is a problem but acknowledged as well that America is the only nation on earth that I know of that in its exceptional way has been gifted with founding documents and founding values and principles that allow us to address the flaws as they arise in our country.”

In our interview Mrs. James reiterates the point that America still struggles with racism: “It is inconceivable to me that there are those who believe that race is no longer a problem in America.” A few years ago, she says, young men in a pickup truck at a Richmond intersection called her by a racial slur and demanded to know what she was doing there.

Yet she rejects the idea that “institutional” or “systemic” racism persists. Thanks to “great strides” in the law, she says, the system is “only as racist as the individuals who occupy it”—though she hastens to add that some of them could “use some heart surgery.”

She chides those conservatives who disdain racial concerns as part of a liberal agenda: “One of the things that I’ve heard is that if you acknowledge the problem then you are playing into the left’s narrative. And I want to say: But it’s not their narrative! We should take it back! It’s our narrative. There would be no civil-rights legislation were it not for the Republican Party. Who led the fight to abolish slavery in this country?”

Conservative values and principles “exclude racism,” she insists, citing her own position as an example: “If I were walking into a progressive think tank I would have to do the calculation and determine: Were they trying to check some boxes, am I a product of their identity politics, did they pick me because I’m black and because I’m a woman? Being a conservative I have the comfort of knowing that at best that was an afterthought.”

But Mrs. James wants conservatives to acknowledge that black Americans contend with both bigotry and disparities. “We can’t have a conversation if they”—protesters—“believe that you don’t even see, understand or acknowledge the problems that we face in this country,” she says. “The difficult part is acknowledging the realities of what’s going on and yet saying that we believe as conservatives that we have real answers to those problems.”

One answer is school choice. “We know that parents make the best decisions about their children and their education, and so we know that we want people who are in poverty to have the choices that rich people naturally have,” she says. “If they’re not getting quality education in the failure factories within their neighborhoods, then maybe they can have other options. Let the money follow the child.”

As for disparities, Mrs. James says they often reflect socioeconomic status, which “cuts across those ethnic groups”: “A lot of times we as conservatives talk about urban and minorities as though all urban [people] and minorities are poor, and we’re not,” she says. The same policies can lift children “in inner-city Chicago or poor Appalachia” out of poverty.

Yet Mrs. James emphasizes that policy can do only so much. While working in the 1990s to reform the Virginia welfare system during Gov. George Allen’s administration, she researched black successes after emancipation, including the Harlem Renaissance and Black Wall Street. Faith and stable families stood out as influences. That taught her the importance of “trying to figure out how to make sure nothing we do in government stands in the way of what we know now by research, but what we knew intuitively then, works.”

Today 51% of black children live in one-parent households. Mrs. James observes that often policy makers “have not recognized the role that family can play and the importance of family in the development, the role that fathers play in children’s lives.” Government regulation also shouldn’t undercut religion, she says: “What we see increasingly in our country is that faith-based institutions are not treated equally or fairly but in many cases undercut and treated unfairly.” Mrs. James became director of George W. Bush’s Office of Personnel Management soon after the administration launched its Faith-Based Initiative, which sought to create a “level playing field” for religious organizations providing social services.

Mrs. James almost sputters—“You can tell that I struggle even to find the words”—when I ask what she thinks of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” which attempts “to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619,” when the first slaves were brought to Jamestown, Va., “as our true founding.”

That dubious history, Mrs. James says, hurts the cause of racial reconciliation. “It does harm because it creates a false narrative about what the real problem is, and if you don’t understand what the real problem is, you can’t come up with real solutions,” she says. “If the real problem is the individuals in this country who still harbor [racism], then I think you need to come up with some ideas for how to influence individuals in this country to change.”

She has two ideas for conservatives who are “looking for a prescription about what we can do at this moment in our country’s history. First, push back against the left’s assault on American institutions. Second, “showing up and being there” individually. “It is amazing to me how often we don’t show up.”

Mrs. James has been showing up for decades. She served as an assistant secretary of health and human services during George H.W. Bush’s administration and in George W. Bush’s White House. She was a spokeswoman for the National Right to Life Committee. She became president of Heritage in 2018, and last year she was “canceled” for the first time. Google employees signed a letter decrying her inclusion on an artificial-intelligence advisory committee, which the company then abandoned.

Mrs. James also shows up at the Gloucester Institute, a nonprofit she founded in Virginia that operates leadership and educational programs for minority college students. The organization says it works with hundreds of students a year, and Mrs. James meets with students and alumni several times annually for conferences, mentoring and informal discussions. One of its objectives is to “cultivate a society of ‘solutionists’ within minority communities,” according to its website.

“My heart’s desire there,” Mrs. James says, “is to raise up a generation of future leaders who can employ critical thinking, who can dissect arguments, who can work across ideological, philosophical and party lines to solve the most important problems of the day.”

She describes her own conservatism not only as a political philosophy but a common-sense outgrowth of her experience. “The reason that I am a conservative today is because I know—I have seen with my own eyes, I have experienced it in my own life, I know—that conservative values and principles win the day,” she says.

Mrs. James has never shied away from race. “Being black means something,” she wrote in 1995. “If you want to know me, want to understand me, want to be my friend, then you must want to know what being black is.” But unlike today’s progressives, she doesn’t disavow “colorblindness.” It is “something we aspire to,” she says. But “I celebrate the fact that in the African-American community we have a rich culture that I have no interest in erasing.”

In the present unrest, Mrs. James takes encouragement from what she’s seen in America since her childhood in that newly integrated Richmond school. “Out of all that came someone, me, who genuinely believes that this is not a racist nation,” she says. “But it is a nation where race is still a factor and still matters and it still exists within men’s hearts. I by nature am an optimist and I by nature recognize the redemptive power that can exist within one’s own heart.”

Do young black students in the Gloucester program share her hopeful outlook about America?

She doesn’t hesitate: “Oh, they really do.”