{"id":160,"date":"2011-07-22T20:22:05","date_gmt":"2011-07-23T00:22:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=160"},"modified":"2011-07-22T20:22:05","modified_gmt":"2011-07-23T00:22:05","slug":"a-forgotten-black-conservative-a-closer-look-at-george-s-schuyler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2011\/07\/a-forgotten-black-conservative-a-closer-look-at-george-s-schuyler.html","title":{"rendered":"A Forgotten Black Conservative: A Closer Look at George S. Schuyler"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the years, the John Birch Society\u2014the organization of which The New American <\/em>is an organ\u2014has been besmirched by its ideological rivals for all\u00a0 manner of evil, most prominently of which is the sin of \u201cracism.\u201d\u00a0 More specifically, given that its membership has always been and remains predominantly white, it is \u201cwhite racism\u201d with which it has been charged.<\/p>\n

However, it is difficult to see how this charge can be made to fit once it is recognized that as far back as the 1960\u2019s, one of the most notable black <\/em>writers in the country\u2014George S. Schuyler\u2014became a member of JBS.\u00a0 Actually, Schuyler was among the most astute, courageous, wittiest, and impassioned writers, black, white, or other.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Of course, that Schuyler was a conservative and a member of JBS is not <\/em>recognized by many because, regretfully, Schuyler himself is no longer remembered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Born in 1895 inRhode Island, Schuyler spent his formative years inSyracuse,New York.\u00a0 He served in World War I and, upon being discharged, moved toHarlemwhere he spent the rest of his days until his death in 1977.\u00a0 Yet during this time, Schuyler enjoyed quite an eventful existence.<\/p>\n

Throughout the decade of the 1920\u2019s, he became associated with that circle of artists that history would recall as \u201cthe Harlem Renaissance.\u201d\u00a0 During this same period, interestingly enough, Schuyler also joined the Socialist Party.\u00a0 However, in his autobiography, Black and Conservative, <\/em>Schuyler admits that it was from a craving for intellectual stimulation, and not an affinity for socialism, that initially drew him to this organization.\u00a0 But even though it was only a relatively short while before he became disenchanted with the ideas of his associates, apparently his time as a member was not for naught, for from this juncture onward, Schuyler became an ardent enemy of all things that so much as remotely smelled of communism.\u00a0 To the end of combating \u201cthe red threat,\u201d he employed his skills as a writer for such publications as H.L. Mencken\u2019s American Mercury <\/em>and The Pittsburg Courier<\/em>, the largest black newspaper publication inAmerica of which Schuyler was editor from 1922 until 1964.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The title of Schuyler\u2019s autobiography, Black and Conservative <\/em>(1966), is indeed a fitting description, for Schuyler was <\/em>a conservative. That there were differences of various sorts between the races he never would have dreamt to deny.\u00a0 But these differences, he insisted, had nothing to do with nature; <\/em>they were cultural.\u00a0 <\/em>To put this point another way, like any good conservative, Schuyler underscored the monumental role that tradition <\/em>plays in constituting identity.\u00a0 And in order to show that it was culture or tradition that accounts for differences<\/em> between black and white Americans, he drew attention to their similarities<\/em>\u2014likenesses that ordinarily escape casual observers of both races.<\/p>\n

For example, Schuyler repudiated the notion that there was something that can aptly be termed \u201cthe Harlem Renaissance\u201d\u2014if <\/em>it is said to center around a distinctively black art.\u00a0 He wrote: \u201cNegro art there has been, is, and will be among the numerous black nations of Africa; but to suggest the possibility of any such development among the ten million colored people in this republic is self-evident foolishness.\u201d\u00a0 Slave songs, \u201cthe blues,\u201d jazz, and \u201cthe Charleston\u201d are alike the creations of blacks, but, as Schuyler notes, they originated with Southern <\/em>blacks and, as such, are \u201cforeign to Northern Negroes, West Indian Negroes, and African Negroes.\u00a0 In short, they are as \u201cexpressive or characteristic of the Negro race\u201d as \u201cthe music and dancing of the Appalachian highlanders or the Dalmatian peasantry are expressive or characteristic of the Caucasian race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Within the context ofAmerica, so-called \u201cNegro art\u201d is in reality Eurocentric.\u00a0 As Schuyler put it, \u201cthe Aframerican [sic] is merely a lampblacked [sic] Anglo-Saxon.\u201d\u00a0 He was not short on substantiation for this claim.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe dean of the Aframerican literati is W.E.B. Du Bois, a product of Harvard and German universities; the foremost Aframerican sculptor is Meta Warwick Fuller, a graduate of leading American art schools and former student of Rodin; while the most noted Aframerican painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, is dean of painters inParisand has been decorated by the French Government.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That black American artists are more akin to their white counterparts than either blacks and whites tend to realize is unsurprising once we consider that \u201cthe Aframerican is subject to the same economic and social forces that mold the actions and thoughts of the white American.\u201d\u00a0 For instance, \u201cin the homes of the black and white Americans of the same cultural and economic level one finds similar furniture, literature, and conversation.\u201d\u00a0 Schuyler asks: \u201cHow, then, can the black American be expected to produce art and literature dissimilar to that of the white American?\u201d<\/p>\n

What Schuyler believes is true of the black American artist he is convinced is no less true of black Americans generally: their dispositions, tastes, and sensibilities are the products, not <\/em>of a uniquely \u201cblack nature,\u201d but the Eurocentric or Anglo-Saxon cultural traditions in which they were nurtured.\u00a0 Conservatives, forever mindful of the tradition or culturally constituted character of individual identity, have always regarded the radically individualistic notion of the \u201cself-made man\u201d as a fiction: no one can literally lift himself up by his own bootstraps, for every person is dependent, often in ways of which he is unaware, upon the assistance of others.\u00a0 Doubtless, Schuyler is of a piece with other conservative thinkers on this score.\u00a0 But he goes a step beyond this to rebuke the related idea that racial groups<\/em> can shed the <\/em>cultural traditions within which their <\/em>distinguishing features were formed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From Schuyler\u2019s discussion of racial issues, conservatives of all races can learn much about their own intellectual tradition.<\/p>\n

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n

originally published at The New American\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the years, the John Birch Society\u2014the organization of which The New American is an organ\u2014has been besmirched by its ideological rivals for all\u00a0 manner of evil, most prominently of which is the sin of \u201cracism.\u201d\u00a0 More specifically, given that its membership has always been and remains predominantly white, it is \u201cwhite racism\u201d with which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA Forgotten Black Conservative: A Closer Look at George S. 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