The past twenty years have produced a great letdown for African-Americans and, with it, a host of explanations for what went wrong. The great gains of the late 1960s and early 1970s ground to a crawl almost as quickly as they had begun. With economic crisis and white backlash, the 1970s produced a “new conservative” political victory in 1980, including a new economic program and the total domination of the national ideological debate by views considered extreme just five years before. By the early 1980s, explanations of racial inequality based on the rational workings of the free market had come to enjoy an official acceptance that had not existed since the 1920s – at least not in intellectual circles. Although there were responses to the market arguments, and good ones, from the black community, they were all set in the context of the political and economic power shift to the right.

This immersion in a dominant white conservative ideology brought legitimacy to the voices of conservative intellectuals, some old and most new, in the black community itself. For the first time since the days of Booker T. Washington, blacks closely linked to white conservative politics – such as Tom Sowell, Shelby Steele, and Clarence Thomas – were being taken seriously by a broad range of political analysts as representative of an important segment of black thinking.