What Color Is a Conservative? My Life and My
Politics
By J.C. Watts, Jr. with Chriss Winston
HarperCollins/294 pages/$24.95
Beginning his political career by running for a seat on the
Oklahoma Corporation Commission in 1990, J.C. Watts made the
startling discovery: his party label meant more to people than his
message. As a former Oklahoma sports star, he had been well known
in the state for years and was a popular public speaker. But now he
was running for office as a Republican, and all bets were off. A
newspaper in Norman, site of his glory days with the Oklahoma
Sooners, wrote that Watts was no longer a hero to kids in the
state. A friend told Watts about a woman who had said she couldn’t
vote for him because she was a Democrat. The friend reminded her
that in a general election, she could vote for whomever she
wished.
“Really?” the woman responded. “I thought if you were black you
had to vote Democrat.”
Among other things, J.C. Watts’
What Color Is a Conservative? sets out to challenge this
seemingly congenital belief among blacks that they must be
Democrats. Most of us are familiar with the numbers — in the last
presidential election, blacks gave an astonishing 91% of their
votes to Al Gore and only 8% to George Bush. What’s more, Bush did
demonstrably worse among blacks than did the previous Republican
candidate, Bob Dole, despite making far greater efforts to woo
them. The infamous NAACP ad blaming Bush for the dragging death of
James Byrd in Texas seemed, perplexingly enough, to be motivated by
Bush’s increased attention to the black vote. No such scurrilous
attacks were made on Dole’s character.
Even appointing blacks to top positions — Colin Powell at
State, Condoleezza Rice to head the National Security Council —
apparently hasn’t helped. Watts describes appearing on a C-Span
call-in program not long after the 2000 election, where a black
caller dismissed the appointments because Rice and Powell were “not
representative of the black community.” It is impossible to avoid
the conclusion that Watts and others have reached: “What scares
them [black Democratic leaders] the most is that black people might
break out of that racial groupthink and start thinking for
themselves.”
Groupthink of any kind was not an issue in the Watts family of
Eufaula, Oklahoma. The future congressman’s ideas grew out of his
values, and his values came from his parents, J.C. Watts Sr. (known
as Buddy) and Helen Watts, who emerge as the most vivid figures in
the book. J.C.’s father was a laborer, farmer, construction worker,
and, when he had saved up enough money to start buying properties,
a landlord. He became the first black police officer in Eufaula in
1969 and was also a minister on Sunday. He was a lifelong Democrat
who secretly split tickets when he thought it appropriate;
apparently, he voted for mostly Republican presidential candidates
from the 1960s on. Helen Watts managed the family finances with
great ingenuity and taught her son how to wash his own clothes,
cook his own meals, and other skills of self-reliance. Though his
parents grew up in the worst of the Jim Crow era, they never had
any illusions about help from high places. “The only helping hand
you can count on,” Buddy Watts said, “is the one at the end of your
sleeve.”
Watts writes that “Our values and belief systems have a lot more
to do with how we were raised and the life we’ve lived than whether
we are Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives.” No
doubt this is true. But everyone knows that Republicans and
Democrats have fundamental differences on values that manifest
themselves in policy. That Watts would become a Republican seems
almost inevitable after reading his story.
AND WHAT A STORY it is. In his 45 years, J.C. Watts has been the
first black quarterback of his high school football team in
Eufaula; the first black man to quarterback the Oklahoma Sooners to
victory in the Orange Bowl (two years in a row, no less); the first
black congressman from the South since Reconstruction; and the
first black man in the Republican congressional leadership. And
yet, the author contends, his life has rarely proceeded according
to any plan. His dream of football stardom came about one New
Year’s Day when he saw Eufaula hometown hero Luscious Selmon
playing for the Sooners on television. But he almost quit Oklahoma
after his freshman season, until his father and coach Barry Switzer
convinced him to stick it out. After college, he starred in the
Canadian Football League for several seasons, but wrestled with
ambivalence there as well.
Though a remarkably successful athlete, Watts was not afflicted
with the great athlete’s inability to walk away from the game. All
along, he kept thinking about what his next move would be. His
religious faith seems to be responsible for this perspective.
Throughout the book, he ascribes each new step in his life to the
Almighty’s will for him. While conjuring the Lord has become a
numbing staple of athletic blather, Watts’s modesty and sincerity
are plain. It makes for surprisingly moving reading.
Once Watts gets down to discussing policy prescriptions, though,
the book loses some of its distinction. He announces a three-part
“New Conservative Strategy for a Better America” that is long on
rhetoric about family renewal, racial harmony, and “new models” of
thinking, but short on specifics. It seems a bit out of place in a
book that is at its best discussing values through compelling
stories. Watts is no threat to Shelby Steele when it comes to
making arguments against racial victimology and the destructive
effects of white guilt. But he does write powerfully of the
“ideological apartheid” in the black community that regards him as
a pariah for his views on poverty and race.
Watts caused an uproar when he described the liberal black
establishment as “race hustling poverty pimps.” But despite that
brave and accurate language, he takes a soft-footed approach to
racial preferences. He stood up to his party on affirmative action
reform during Newt Gingrich’s tenure as House Speaker. While
expressing his disagreement with the concept of racial quotas, he
decided that the country was not ready to do away with affirmative
action altogether. His thinking here is somewhat muddled. On the
one hand, he argues for assistance based on economic need, not
race; on the other, he writes that the Republican Party simply
hasn’t “laid the foundation” to communicate with Americans about
why affirmative action is wrong. The party would be sending a
message, he told Gingrich, that “We don’t believe racism exists.”
When it comes to affirmative action, Watts apparently shares in
some degree the view of the racial Left that Republicans are
insensitive. Have the race hustlers and poverty pimps gotten to him
here? On other issues fraught with racial politics — like welfare
and education reform — he has been immune to their
intimidation.
One of Buddy Watts’s favorite sayings was, “If you keep walkin’
down a bear trail, eventually you’re gonna run into a bear.” Watts
surprised many with his decision to retire from Congress in 2002.
Is this book a summing up or a prelude? Speculation continues that
he will return, possibly for a Senate run in 2004 if Don Nickles
retires. But it is equally likely that Watts has concluded he is
not cut out to scale the heights in Washington; or maybe he sees
one of his father’s bears down the end of that path. Whatever his
thinking, he has consistently demonstrated an ability to understand
his limitations, to take stock and move on. Athletes typically have
enormous difficulty doing this. Politicians don’t find it much
easier.
J.C. Watts has been both of these, but neither has ever fully
defined him. Free men, like conservatives, come in all colors.
