Column: Minority Conservatism?

With Senate Democrats refusing the nomination of Honduran-born conservative Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, politicians left and right are using race to score political points.

Considered second only to the Supreme Court in importance, Washington's federal court of appeals has been the stepping stone for three current Supreme Court justices. With Chief Justice Rehnquist's potential retirement and major cases concerning affirmative action and abortion looming large on the high court's plate, every lower-court appointment is being looked at with unusual scrutiny. But President George W. Bush's nomination of Estrada - a Harvard Law graduate and former clerk to the Supreme Court - has stirred substantial opposition from what many would call the most unlikely of groups: Democrats and Latinos.

Estrada is Latino, but can he "lose" his ethnicity because of his conservative political views?

While Bush and Republican leaders sincerely hope not, Democrats are betting that he can. Like his father, Bush is using the appointment of a non-white conservative who supports his agenda to curry favor among minorities. For the elder Bush, it was Clarence Thomas. Now it's Miguel Estrada. With Bush's dismal campaign to minorities in the 2000 election - particularly in the black community - this nomination may be his most sincere form of outreach, save the "diverse" cabinet he assembled in the wake of his narrow victory. Senator Orrin Hatch, who criticized the Democrats as being "anti-Latino," demonstrates the key problem with Republicans' use of race: Although Estrada clearly espouses a staunch conservative ideology, politicians on the right submit Estrada's cultural background as shallow evidence of their weak commitment to civil rights.

But Democrats are most to blame for exploiting Estrada's race. By not fitting some prescribed political mold for minorities, Estrada challenges the very notion that race can be used uniformly as a proxy for viewpoint. Liberals like Representative Robert Menendez of New Jersey assert that Estrada only "shares a surname" with Latinos but that he lacks a certain quality of Latino-ness that should predispose him toward a liberal ideology. Because Estrada comes from a privileged background and does not fit the stereotype of the disadvantaged barrio Latino, Democrats argue that Estrada loses his authenticity as a minority. It is critical to remember, though, that this authenticity does not come with a disadvantaged background, but only with a liberal viewpoint. (Case in point: Democrats love to see wealthy black liberals in power.)

There should be serious concerns with this logic. Perhaps most importantly, it deals a great blow to the compelling case for affirmative action. By conflating minorities' ideologies with their race in this manner, Democrats do a disservice to affirmative action proponents. Minorities with articulate conservative viewpoints - the Estradas, the Clarence Thomases, the Stephen Carters, the Richard Rodriguezes and the Shelby Steeles - consequently lose their cultural identities in the process, and the vicious cycle of thinking about blacks and Latinos as a monolithic underclass perpetuates itself. Those who think that minority conservatives are "sell-outs," "worse" than white conservatives or more "white" than whites themselves only give credence to the critics of affirmative action who would argue that race has no standing in merit decisions about qualifications for college admissions or jobs. Further, this knee-jerk characterization of conservatism as white reinforces the prevailing notion that all whites are Trent Lotts in the making. Ascribing a certain political ideology to all members of a particular ethnic group only serves to deepen racial tensions in America, and it invariably ends up in a loss of culture - for blacks, for Latinos, for whites, for all.

I venture to say that Duke students can witness this distorted logic first-hand on a weekly basis. Last Tuesday, Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, gave a thoughtful, poignant speech in Page Auditorium on the case for black reparations in America. With one sentence in the ensuing question-and-answer session, however, Robinson significantly discredited his whole hour-and-a-half-long speech by quipping, "Everyone knows Clarence Thomas is only biologically black." What is Robinson saying? That to disagree with the "prevailing" viewpoint in one's ethnic group implies the loss of one's own culture or ethnicity?

The civil rights movement was not about giving minorities the freedom to be liberals. It was about giving them the freedom to be whatever the hell they wanted to be. It is distressing that jokes like this one come by and large from members of minority communities, but what is most disturbing is the implication that minorities cannot come to their own conclusions when it comes to politics and that they are mindless drones waiting to be convinced into liberalism by the political pundits and pandering vote-getters. I encourage anyone who is reading this column to read Robinson's book and consider his powerful ideas, but consider it with the preceding grain of salt.