In 1999, the African American conservative writer and intellectual Shelby Steele wrote of the “animus, demonization, misunderstanding, and flat-out, undifferentiated contempt” that is so often directed at black conservatives in the United States. In what has become a seminal essay for black conservatives, Steele's “The Loneliness of the ‘Black Conservative’,” published in the Hoover Digest, attempted to explain the complexities of black conservatism. Steele, like other prominent black conservatives – such as Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Robert Woodson, John McWhorter, Jay Parker, and Anne Wortham – have attracted a small but dedicated following among conservative African Americans, many of whom complain that their “blackness” is often questioned, and their “Negro card” revoked, for their conservative political views.

The history of black conservativism – especially its modern manifestations – has attracted surprisingly little scholarly analysis; indeed, the scholarship that does exist is superficial and often slides into ad hominem attacks against black conservatives. Michael Ondaatje's Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America is therefore a welcome (and long-overdue) addition to African American intellectual history. Ondaatje begins his thoroughly researched and thoughtful analysis of black conservatives by introducing readers to the biographies of Sowell, Thomas, Loury, Williams, Steele, Woodson, McWhorter, Parker, and Wortham. These nine African Americans have arguably been the most influential black conservatives over the past generation. But Ondaatje cautions that we should not view these leading black conservatives as a homogeneous group. He argues that a “spectrum of black conservative opinion,” including the ideas of the “neoconservative, populist, libertarian, and even the liberal,” can be found in black conservative thought (53).

Ondaatje skillfully weaves the ideas of the nine black conservatives noted above into insightful chapters that focus on affirmative action, poverty and socioeconomic inequality, and recent debates over school reform. Written in a crisp and engaging style, Ondaatje contextualizes black conservative intellectualism in the broader intellectual and historical context of civil rights and post-civil rights America. He notes that black conservatives characterized affirmative action programs as a “hussle” and insisted that the “redemptive liberal politics” of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society had failed. These ideas matched perfectly with the Reagan administration's emphasis on “color-blind” individualism during the 1980s (41, 59, 60).

Black conservative intellectuals provided “authenticity” to the Reagan administration's dismantling of affirmative action and Great Society programs. Thomas Sowell, who emerged as the “unofficial intellectual messiah” of black conservatism in the mid-1970s, asserted that affirmative action and the federal government's redistribution of wealth hurt African Americans (30). Sowell and other black conservatives argued that affirmative action and government redistribution programs produced a loss of “self-esteem” among blacks, created dependency on government welfare, and undermined what some black conservatives argued had once been a “golden age” of African American “self-help” (92). For example, Ondaatje notes that Walter Williams made the specious claim that the “welfare state” did to the “black family what slavery, Jim Crowism, and the rankest racism could never have done” (102). While Ondaatje is evenhanded in his treatment of black conservatism, he is also penetrating in his criticism of the ahistorical and often self-serving nature of black conservative intellectuals.

Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America is an important contribution to African American historiography, black studies, and the racial politics of modern America. While Ondaatje's analysis will appeal to both scholars and the general reading public, its greatest utility is its reminder of the vibrant and highly contested nature of black intellectual and cultural history. Ondaatje has thus provided us with a platform from which to reinvigorate our analyses of African American thought in United States history.