White Conservative’s Racial Gaze.

A thought on this nagging feeling I get as a “black conservative”.

Forgive me when I tell you that I don’t know what this boy’s name is, nor do I care. The subject here is the white people’s racial gaze an the event a “Black conservative” is on the floor. It’s almost trophy-like, how they’re acting with him. Never mind that a child really doesn’t have the capacity to critically think on what conservative politics really entails. Washington, D.C. | 3 Oct 2020 | Photo Credit: Johnny Silvercloud

Throughout my whole Black life in political America, there’s been this thing nagging that I could never get my finger around. Perhaps you feel it too. Maybe you see and sense it yourself as a less conservative white person, looking in from the outside. Being that I have been a conservative before I will have to say that this thing I’m now calling the conservative racial gaze.

A Black Conservative Past

Johnny Silvercloud in his twenties, Heidelberg, Germany (2003–2004). Didn’t really think on it, but technically I would be a Black conservative back then. Not thinking on it is part of the Black conservative process. | Photo Credit: Johnny Silvercloud

I most certainly have been a “conservative” before. I practically spent my whole 20’s as a conservative. I was in the Army at the time, which is built to reinforce a conservative outlook on life. I was a “Bush conservative”, I suppose. I was an anti-LGBT pro-gun, pro-torture conservative thought my Army life was an extension of Jack Bauer.

I know what it’s like to be the lone Black guy in a sea of white people. I remember the rewarding feeling of being the “enforcer” Black dude for my white friends at the time. I remember protecting them from being jumped by other white hoodlums in clubs and bars. There’s a particular…