I WAS SHOCKED by the news about Claude A. Allen, the black former White House staffer whose rising star officially flamed out after he was arrested on charges of felony theft last week.
Not shocked that he got arrested -- so many Republicans are being handcuffed these days for scams of one kind or another that it's hard to keep the names and charges straight. What shocked me was how penny ante his alleged scam was, how unbefitting a man of Allen's stature and lofty ideals rooted in the requisite conservative principles of God, fiscal prudence and anti-affirmative action activism above all else.
Getting a reported few thousand dollars worth of refunds fraudulently at small-ticket stores such as Target and Hecht's is downright anticlimactic, especially for a black man who had enough personal wealth and White House in-crowd connections to swing something much bigger -- real estate fraud, dummy offshore companies. The possibilities were endless.
I don't support conservatism in its current iteration, and I support black conservatives even less, but we cannot ignore the racial implications of this latest Republican fall from grace. Here is a decidedly white-collar black man getting clipped for a blue-collar crime associated with economic necessity, one that practically guarantees prison time for most black men in this country. (Even if he's ultimately convicted, it's doubtful that Allen will end up behind bars.)
Here is a man who, like most black conservatives, has had to do an awful lot of personal and political rationalizing to pay dues, which included apprenticing with then-North Carolina senator and habitual racist Jesse Helms and opposing the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.
Allen, a lawyer, was also President Bush's top advisor on domestic policy in an era when domestic policy has been indifferent at best to the growing needs of the poor -- the black poor especially. Bush is fond of this kind of symbolism: putting black faces in key positions in order to appear racially progressive. It wouldn't be such a bad thing if the faces actually were progressive or had a vision more pressing than being loyal to the president, but they don't.
Loyalty has been the price of admission to this administration, and black conservatives have proved to be more loyal than most.
