J. C. Watt’s Memoir, What Color is a Conservative? should be a primary text for Republicans dumbfounded by black America’s loyalty to the Democratic Party . Perhaps more than any other book in recent memory, Color effectively demonstrates why African Americans recoil in horror when “Republican” is preceded by the adjective “black .” By no means should this revelation be attributed to Watts, however. NaYve and obtuse, Color is a failed memoir that bears all the markings of Watts’s press office . But in its lack of candor, in its total inability to grapple with complexity, Color unwittingly demonstrates why African Americans view Republicans with such disdain, and why, after Watts retires this year, there will not be a single black Republican in Congress.By now, Watts’s story has been well trafficked through Washington’s hoary corridors. Watts hails from Eufala, Okla. His father was a lifelong Democrat, with conservative leanings (pro-life, anti-welfare). He was stern, religious, and packed a pistol in his glove compartment. Watts was, of course, poor, but because his family embraced traditional values (hard work, community, church), they barely knew it.
Somewhat of a hellion, Watts was held in check by his tight-knit community and his father’s penchant for corporal punishment. In high school and college, he excelled at athletics, rising to national fame as an all-American quarterback at the University of Oklahoma, where he won a national championship, went on to a career in the Canadian Football League, and became locally famous enough to run for Congress. Some years later, after hearing Senate candidate Don Nickles speak, he defied his father and became a Republican. It wasn’t that much of a leap. He had been a conservative all along and was a Democrat only by inheritance. In 1994, Watts rode the Gingrich wave into office–the only one of 23 black Republicans running that year to win a congressional election–and brought his inspirational story to bitter, partisan Washington. Oh yeah, along the way, Watts had a few run-ins because he happened to be black.
And to Watts, that’s all they are, minor run-ins without any systemic element. To his credit, he does not deny being the target of prejudice. But beyond this admission, he has almost nothing else to say on the subject–even though he gives himself plenty of chances. There are the whites who repeatedly question whether Watts, as a black man, can really play quarterback, invoking the common slur that blacks aren’t smart enough to play that position. There is the white woman who calls Watts and his friends “dogs.” There is the white man who tells Watts that even if he gets elected to Congress, he will just be another nigger. Yet, beset by all this venom, Watts–as he tells it–swallows all his anger after briefly lamenting the problem. In a way, his stiff upper lip is Jackie Robinson-noble, but the reader can’t help but wonder about the conclusion he draws about the nature of American racism.
In one instance, as captain of his high school football team, Watts ends up being homecoming king and has to hold court with a white homecoming queen. The town’s tradition has always held that the king and queen kiss at the center of the football field after being crowned. But despite being a popular guy in recently integrated Eufala, Watts and the queen do not kiss. Watts is amazingly vague about the whole incident: “The big night arrived, but in the end, we didn’t have the kiss that might have caused more problems than it was certainly worth. No big decision was made. We just didn’t do it.” Interracial relationships in the South are weighted with a legacy of lynching, rape, and sheer terrorism; yet from all of this, Watts can only conclude, “as much as Eufala had changed, we still had issues that none of us were certain how to handle.”
In another instance, Watts tells how two brothers, “the MacGuire boys,” terrorized him and other little black children for sport, to the point of chasing them in a truck. Yet Watts refuses to analyze what effect this abuse had on him, simply saying that it all worked out in the end because the MacGuire boys ended up in jail. Later, he recounts meeting an elderly white couple at a restaurant in Canada. They strike up a conversation with Watts and eventually invite him to their home for wine and cheese. Watts declines, but is touched by the invitation and notes that such a thing would never happen in his hometown. But he refuses to ask why, and this is the book’s central problem as a memoir. It spends a lot of words but reveals precious little, especially about its purported focus: race.
To Watts, racism in the South never rose above the misguided tomfoolery of a few ignoramuses, a view that pretty much mirrors that of the GOP and highlights why conservatives have a hard time making inroads into the black community. Modern conservative ideology rests on an idyllic vision of the past, a time when men worked hard, women tended the home, and the whole family went to church.
The history of African Americans, more than any other minority group save Native Americans, severely complicates this picture. For in the past, white men didn’t just work, they also exploited their sharecroppers and terrorized black businessmen. Families didn’t just go to church on Sunday; they also went to lynchings with picnic baskets. But because conservatives venerate the past, race relations are necessarily simplified to paint the prettiest possible picture of America. So Jim Crow becomes a necessary evil, the Confederate flag has nothing to do with slavery, and lynch mobs were not formed by your fathers and sisters, but from misanthropes existing outside of society.
It is a reading of history that conflicts with everything African Americans know about themselves and about their tormentors. But for Watts, as a conservative politician, it is essential. If he really were to analyze race in his hometown, I suspect he would end up repudiating his own romantic vision of the South of yore, and consequently questioning his own party. But he does not allow himself this level of honesty, because at its core, Color is not a memoir but a defense of Watts’s right to be black and Republican.
The tragedy for Watts and his conservative allies is that their own defensiveness is their worst enemy. Certainly one can hold conservative principles and question America’s historic relationship with African Americans. Just look at Louis Farrakhan. But the GOP’s rigidity, and ultimately, its tendency to airbrush the reality of racism, past and present, out of its vision of America, prevents the party from matching even the nuanced perspective of a man as dogmatic as Farrakhan, who recently has found a receptive audience among middle-class blacks with his lectures on personal responsibility and traditional family values. African Americans are acutely aware of this, and thus are acutely aware of the difference between being a conservative and being a Republican. While they don’t advertise it, many blacks fall into the former category, but as things are, very few will ever fall into the latter. Which is why, when J.C. Watts leaves Congress, there won’t be many people lining up to fill his shoes as that body’s token black Republican.
| Ta-Nehisi Coates is a New York writer who writes frequently on race and culture for The Washington Monthly. | |
| Ta-Nehisi Coates is a New York writer who writes frequently on race and culture for The Washington Monthly. |
Of related interest from The Washington Monthly archives:
The GOP’s Great Black Hope: He talks like Kemp but votes with Gingrich. Whose side is J.C. Watts on?
by Amy Waldman, from The Washington Monthly’s October 1996 issue
Of related interest from The Washington Monthly archives:
The GOP’s Great Black Hope: He talks like Kemp but votes with Gingrich. Whose side is J.C. Watts on?
by Amy Waldman, from The Washington Monthly’s October 1996 issue
