LAT Op-Ed: Conservativsm Drove Claude Allen To Crime

Oh, Lordy:

Claude Allen's life sentence

Did the pressures of being a black conservative take a toll on the former Bush aide?

...

I don't support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less...

Why? Because they don't display the requisite level of gratitude for what white liberals have supposedly done for them?

... but we cannot ignore the racial implications of this latest Republican fall from grace.

We can't? I was kind of ignoring it. I didn't really see any implications.

As usual, conservatives ignore race while liberals won't shut up about it.

Imagine if a conservative wrote about a black conservative (or black liberal, for that matter) breaking the law, and announced "we cannot ignore the racial implications of this."

Here is a decidedly white-collar black man getting clipped for a blue-collar crime associated with economic necessity, one that practically guarantees prison time for most black men in this country. (Even if he's ultimately convicted, it's doubtful that Allen will end up behind bars.)

A first-time non-violent offense -- fraud, not even actual theft or robbery -- "practically guarantees prison time for most black men in this country"?

Really?

Here is a man who, like most black conservatives, has had to do an awful lot of personal and political rationalizing to pay dues, which included apprenticing with then-North Carolina senator and habitual racist Jesse Helms and opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

...

Loyalty has been the price of admission to this administration, and black conservatives have proved to be more loyal than most.

Here it comes...

That has unfortunately, but not always unfairly, invited comparisons to slave times, when the most loyal blacks were those who worked in closest proximity to their white masters — house Negroes, as they were derisively known. Such Negroes gained privilege but lost standing in their own community, a price that might have been reasonable if they were eventually granted the same status as the whites they so assiduously served. They weren't, of course; race has always mattered. And it matters now, though the dynamic is more subtle and devious.

...

It's hard to imagine that such compromises and cognitive dissonance don't exact a psychological toll at some point, and Allen's alleged dabbling in crime might have been that point for him.

Was he testing the limits of a power he wasn't sure he had, but needed? Was he fatally overconfident — fatal indeed for a black man — that his position shielded him from the consequences of crime, or at least the consequences of petty theft? After a career of always conducting himself appropriately, as his mentor Clarence Thomas reportedly advised, did he finally crack under the pressure? (All black folk, even conservatives, know they have to be three times as upstanding just to get along.) Was he acting out a latent bitterness at being denied a spot on the federal appeals court by a Senate that found his resume too thin and his past reference to gays as "queer" too cavalier for comfort? Or was he a closeted compulsive grifter who would have done this anyway? Hard to know.

Hard to know, but apparently pretty easy to get this kind of off-the-cuff bullshit-session nonsense printed in the LA Times.

Was he fatally overconfident — fatal indeed for a black man ...

Is it just me, or is that kind of racist?

The op-ed was written by Erin Aubrey Kaplan. Her name alone indicates that Erin Aubrey Kaplan has her finger on the pulse of the black male zeitgeist.

Thanks to Allah.

Related: Police found dozens of thirty year old Trapper Keepers in Mr. Allen's garage.

posted by Ace at 01:28 PM

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