Sadly, however, Dillard is ill-equipped to offer much meaningful or substantive analysis of the arguments of minority conservatives. She is interested only in analyzing these thinkers’ rhetorical positioning, especially the relationship between their autobiographies and the stands they took. Dillard lives in the postmodern dreamland that hovers disconnected from reality like Gulliver’s Laputa, the floating island of intellectuals. Her disdain for facts is palpable. For example, she repeatedly labels as “stereotypes” all references to blacks’ suffering from high rates of illegitimacy and murder. It never seems to occur to her that they describe actual live babies and dead bodies. She also accuses “multicultural conservatives” of trying “to assimilate on the backs of the black poor.” In reality, black conservatives since Booker T. Washington have traditionally focused more on uplifting the black poor, while black liberals have worked harder to help the black elite that W. E. B. DuBois dubbed the “Talented Tenth.” The NAACP, for instance, cares more about restoring quotas at UC-Berkeley than doing anything that would actually help inner-city schools.
The value of nonwhite pundits to the conservative movement is reflected in an old joke that the humorless Dillard fails to include:
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