What's the Matter with Black Folks?

Ross Douthat quotes the following passage from Daniel Larison for the benefit of the liberal "trying to understand the conservative mind, circa 2008":

The small cottage industry out there cataloguing the "real racism" of liberals represents a genuine conviction in the modern GOP that they are the only true defenders of color-blind equality. The Republican obsession with Jeremiah Wright cannot be understood apart from this "fight the real racists!" mentality. The enthusiastic reception of Palin and the sudden willingness to label any criticism of her as sexism and elitism reflects a similar impulse to out-egalitarian the egalitarians. This is opportunistic insofar as it is aimed at confusing conventional definitions and throwing the opponent off guard ("we're the real feminists, so there!"), but it is quite serious in that reflects a widely-held Republican belief that their agenda and their party represent "empowerment" for women and minorities.

I don't doubt that the impulses Larison describes inform the behavior of many conservatives. But as an attempt to characterize the deeper currents of conservative attitudes generally about race and gender (and racism and sexism), this simply doesn't hold water. If the "sudden willingness to label any criticism of [Palin] as sexism" actually sprang from an egalitarian impulse, we should have seen that impulse exercised also on behalf of liberal women. We haven't. Cf. Hillary Clinton, who's remarks about the "glass ceiling" were jeered, precedent to Palin's invocation of them, at which point they were cheered. The same goes with racism and liberal blacks. Cf. Colin Powell, whose appointment would be an exemplar of enlightened, egalitarian impulses among conservatives, except that when he up and endorsed Barack Obama, we were informed Powell's selection was "totally about race" -- an inadvertent and fatally revealing self-referential declaration. (Examples could be multiplied.)

Moreover, to whatever extent conservatives are committed to the idea that the Republican agenda uniquely "represent[s] 'empowerment' for women and minorities," conservatives are faced with the awkward fact that voting patterns strongly suggest that women and minorities themselves believe otherwise. Of course it's entirely possible that Republicans understand the challenges and interests of women and minorities better than women and minorities do. But then that tack betrays an odd attachment to just the sort of "bad faith" type of explanation conservatives very much want to eschew.

Finally, just a note on the notion (presupposed by Ross) that colorblindness is superior to "racialism" ("race consciousness" would be more like it, given the common confounding of "racial," "racialist" and "racist"). This idea really has to go. That anyone can be colorblind ignores the scads of evidence that even those who aspire to racial equality are psychologically riven through with deep, unconscious, and probably ineliminable racial bias. (Yes, even if some of your best friends are black.) Since the only way to counter or reshape these unconscious biases is to take race explicitly into account, any regime of "colorblind" institutions will be effectively racist.