Undead, Unwhite, Unmale

...Add to that the claim that the personal is the political, and you have a world in which things like race and gender ought to have irreversible and definite political meanings...

...Its minority representatives are identity dissidents who refuse to accept the political identities assigned to them...

...If you want a colorblind society, you have to have a colorblind public policy...

...They're a group Dil-lard is uncomfortable with, holding, as they do, "ideologies" that she does not "particularly like...

...In response, conservatism embraces a strategy of assimilation guided by individualism and self-reliance...

...Theirs is a philosophy "dominated by a supposed consensus around the desirability of assimilation, not as members of an artificially contrived minority but as individuals, as citizens, as Americans...

...The problem with Dillard's book, despite its historical legwork, is plainly evident in her cumbersome term "multicultural conservative...

...BY MATTHEW ROSE The state of race politics and current academic fashion apparently requires that there be a book on "multicultural conservatism...

...In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?, Angela Dillard, a young professor of history at New York University, explores the curious and often surprising roles minorities have played as foils and philosophers for the conserMatthew Rose is an editorial assistant at First Things...

...Here we learn about near-forgotten people like Claude McKay, part of the cadre of writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance, who mounted vociferous attacks against Communists and "totalitarian liberals" and later entered the Roman Catholic Church, "the greatest political organization of the world...

...began, Dillard admits in the preface, "as something of a joke during a dinner party...

...Indeed, she can't overcome her astonishment at their existence, "given the extent to which the conservative tradition was shaped by racialist and outright racist doctrines, by heterosexual-patriarchal notions of gender and family, and by xenophobic influence...

...vative movement...

...She never quite transcends that old, dust-gathering genre of liberal books about conservatism, the subtitle of all of which could be "I Can't Believe They Really Believe This Stuff...

...Or the black reactionary George Schuyler, an anti-Communist and John Birch Society member, who helped found the Conservative Political Union in New York...

...Dillard shrewdly realizes the subversive effect brown, black, and lavender conservatives have on the Left's favorite metaphysical claim: the notion that truth is a function of historical, racial, and sexual identity...

...But what she lacks in argument she begins to make up for by unearthing conservative traditions and historical figures in minority cultures...

...We learn too about contemporary activists such as Elizabeth Wright, with her black conservative newsletter Issues and Views, and the odd figure of Susan Au Allen, who recommends fighting crime with the "Asian techniques of shame" that humiliate criminals by strapping them to car hoods...

...A "multicultural conservative," in Dillard's sense, would be a very strange creature indeed...

...And that, of course, is the reason that even a much better book on this topic must fail...

...Dillard proves incapable of entertaining an idea not filtered through the categories of hegemony, racism, and patriarchy, and her own politics remain undisturbed throughout...

...These figures, we are told, borrow heavily from the fundamental idea of neoconservatism: The nettle-some problems of justice and inequality have little to do with racial or sexual discrimination when compared with the larger moral problems of culture...

...She nervously suspects that such black conservatives as Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele have exposed the hidebound racial orthodoxy of the Left...

...Conservatism claims the universal values that made the West the political, moral, scientific, and economic leader of the world—and these are the traditions multiculturalism aims at detonating...

...The existence of Clarence Thomas is a metaphysical self-contradiction...

...For Dillard, the danger is that they are successfully positioning themselves as the true heirs of the civil-rights movement's insistence that civil society should be a color-blind place where citizens meet as equals in the eyes of the law, a place "decontaminated" by the petty issues of skin color, gender, and sexual preference...

...Dillard's only theoretical thrust is the claim that the authority of multicultural conservatives is derived from the "identities" they consider nonessential to poli-tics—and therefore those "identities" must be considered essential to politics...

...But Dillard, to her credit, does her reluctant best to approach minority conservatives with a measure of even-hand-edness...

...Some of her characters are familiar, but others are quite obscure, and she wisely focuses her most sustained attention on stories and people that have received little attention...

...But does it have to be jar-gony, confused, uneven, and done by an effusive anti-conservative...

...What Dillard doesn't understand, it must be said, is that conservatism has never been and can never be "multicultural" in the Left's sense of the term, which is only a thinly disguised cultural relativism and anti-Western prejudice...

...In the end, however, she offers only the now-shopworn complaint that minority conservatives champion a politics that is destructive to the interest of minority, working-class, and poor people...

...Jorge Amselle of the Center for Equal Opportunity speaks for the lot of them: "You don't cure the problem of people treating each other differently because of race by having government treat people differently because of race...

...Dillard does grudgingly admit that multicultural conservatives are not being manipulated (no "false consciousness," we are blessedly told), and concedes that they are to be taken with the utmost seriousness—an intelligent and savvy movement no longer to be considered, as Amiri Baraka put it, "pods growing in the cellars of our politics...

...The idea for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now...