Blacks are more conservative than liberal whites

From a New Republic article by Julia Ioffe:

“During times of unrest, black writers going back to the early 20th century have argued that the reason blacks are facing discrimination or police brutality is because they have not been acting properly in public—particularly young, poor people,” says Michael Dawson, a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. “In the last 20 years, it’s been a criticism of baggy pants, rap music, hair styles. Back in my generation, it was Afros. I remember my grandparents telling me, ‘you should cut your hair.’”

Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving “properly,” so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites—“with ‘properly’ being a normatively white middle class presentation,” says Dawson.

Acting like a respectable middle-class person instead of a gangster from the ghetto seems like common sense to me. But apparently, the author of the article seems to believe that blacks who say what sounds like common sense to me are victims of internalizing white racist attitudes.

Actually what this does demonstrate is that blacks are more conservative than people realize. You assume they are liberal because they vote for Democrats, but they vote Democratic because Democrats give them stuff (like affirmative action, welfare, Obama phones, etc.), because it makes blacks feel powerful when whites act subservient to blacks and Democrat do that much better than Republicans, and for reasons of black solidarity. But solidarity towards one’s group (whether that be one’s race, religion, country, etc) is a conservative feeling and not a liberal feeling.