Confessions of a Black College Republican

A real coup from the liberal bloggers at the 1832 Blog:

. . . a black student named Marcus Miller, a Republican, explaining why he is a Republican. And he’s not apologetic at all, but rather a fellow who has learned from the experiences of his parents, reacted against racial hustlers, and come to believe in limited government.

. . . if I had to quantify my reasons for being a Republican, I would say that they came out to be 60% ideological, 30% reactionary, and 10% parentally influenced. . . . The 10% parental influence comes from watching my parents work ridiculously hard for pretty much everything, and simultaneously insulating me from a lot of the financial burdens that they have faced over the years. . . . To make a long story short, my parents busted their asses for 10 years straight to finally see both of their boys go off to college, and the values that they put before me were of a conservative nature: life is all about the choices you make, anyone can improve their situation with the right tools (and the same ones as everyone else), opportunities always make themselves available if you have faith in God, and of course, taxes suck. Bigtime. And terrorists. Terrorists really get on my nerves.

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. . . I’m reacting to the concept of the African American that people like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Kanye West, and other so-called and wannabe “spokespersons of the black community” proliferate throughout the nation and the world. I don’t want or need Jesse speaking for me as a black man under any circumstances. I don’t want or need Al Sharpton stirring up the already volatile racial brew in this country for me, despite what he or others think of his methods—I’ve dealt with what happens when you stir that brew in my life already. I sure as hell don’t want or need a guy who thinks he was abducted by aliens to sap credibility from the Black Muslims, one of the few uniquely black sources of faith and strength within the Afro American community.

[...]

The 60% ideological part of my political identity is simultaneously the most of where I get my ideas of government from and the easiest to explain, so I’ll make it short: I believe that government should be as limited as possible and entirely geared toward 1) defending the country, and 2) doing the best it can to allow society to live how it chooses. You can’t have the freedom to throw Oreos at me if you’re getting bombed into oblivion by terrorists or another country, can you? (I hate terrorists. They are the bane of my political existence.) I also believe that the government’s social responsibility should be limited towards ensuring that everyone in society has the same tools to be able to prosper and be successful.

Miller, apparently, didn’t wander haphazardly into a Republican identification and didn’t adopt it opportunistically, but drew the logical conclusions from his own experiences and his own judgments.

A lot of people do that, but it requires an extra measure of courage for a black person to do that.