The Grift

How can you tell principled ideological diversity from opportunism that harms the very people it claims to represent? In The Black Republican Grift, Clay Cane argues that a specific pattern has emerged over 150 years: a recurring set of Black public figures who rebrand themselves to gain proximity to power, money, or fame while advancing or excusing policies that weaken Black political power. Cane’s central claim is blunt: the modern Black Republican grift is not about sincere conservatism; it’s about shape-shifting for personal advancement, even when that requires community betrayal.

The book equips you with a working definition of the grift and three hallmarks: shape-shifting rhetoric, community betrayal, and proximity over principle. Crucially, Cane separates genuine ideological variety (think Colin Powell or Edward Brooke, who sometimes bucked party orthodoxy) from theatrics that trade racial cover for material harm (from Clarence Thomas’s jurisprudence to Tim Scott’s voting record). He urges you to judge by pattern and payoff, not soundbites.

Where the pattern begins

Cane starts with the original meaning of Black Republicanism: Frederick Douglass and Radical Republicans who demanded federal power to secure freedom, voting rights, education, and safety. Douglass’s relentless pressure on Abraham Lincoln, his insistence on Black suffrage, and his critique of colonization plans reveal a template for principled engagement: hold power accountable, even when it wears your party’s label. You see Reconstruction’s brief realization of that vision—Black voter registration around 80% in 1868, elected Black officials like Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, and public education gains—followed by organized white backlash and elite Republican retreat.

(Note: Cane draws on Lerone Bennett Jr.’s revisionist view of Lincoln to puncture hagiography and re-center Black agency. The lesson mirrors works by Eric Foner on Reconstruction: rights on paper require federal enforcement.)

From accommodation to modern media tokens

When federal protection faded, a countertradition rose: accommodation and Black capitalism. Figures like Booker T. Washington and Isaiah Montgomery traded political demands for limited economic opportunity. In the 20th century, Republican leaders repackaged this logic as "Black capitalism"—Nixon’s Minority Business Enterprise and showcase projects like Soul City—often starved by conservative gatekeepers after they had served their optics purpose. Cane shows how this logic returns under Trump as a celebrity economy: Omarosa, Candace Owens, Diamond and Silk, and Herschel Walker get rewarded for spectacle and loyalty, not policy competence.

The media machine amplifies the grift’s performance half: cable producers and social platforms prize a Black face saying systems are fine and individuals should bootstrap. The utility half is political: these figures give cover to voter suppression, weakened civil-rights enforcement, and trickle-down schemes dressed as community uplift. You’re invited to look past the image to the ledger of votes, budgets, and court rulings.

The stakes you can measure

Cane grounds the pattern in consequences. Clarence Thomas, who benefited from race-conscious openings, has authored or joined opinions limiting voting-rights protections and action on systemic discrimination, while invoking a personal narrative that sidesteps structural remedies. Tim Scott markets a "cotton to Congress" arc, but his votes against the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, his weak policing bill that preserved qualified immunity, and his defense of opportunity zones—often a windfall for wealthy investors—tell a different story. At HUD, Ben Carson’s budget cuts, attempted rollback of fair-housing rules, and management scandals show how inexperience plus ideological contempt can hollow out protections many families rely on.

Cane also maps how this politics intersects with democratic erosion. After 2020, Republicans advanced hundreds of restrictive voting proposals; Daniel Cameron joined efforts challenging Pennsylvania ballots while his handling of the Breonna Taylor case raised deep concerns about selective prosecution. The through-line is clear: spectacle smooths the path for policies that shrink Black political power and civic equality.

Your role in breaking the cycle

This is not a counsel of despair. Cane returns to the Reconstruction model and to mid-20th-century visions like the Freedom Budget (A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr.) to argue for a federal, race-conscious, and worker-centered approach: living wages, robust housing enforcement, voting rights with teeth, and targeted capital for existing local businesses. He points you to organizing vehicles—Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight, Color of Change, NAACP, National Urban League—and insists that down-ballot focus and turnout in off-year cycles decide whether protective laws hold or wither.

Key Idea

Judge leaders by alignment with community-protective policy, not by identity claims or personal grit stories. Follow power, incentives, and outcomes rather than vibes.

If you want a simple test, Cane offers one: track the pattern and payoff. When a high-profile conversion coincides with donor access, airtime, or appointments—while the record shows votes or rulings that weaken voting rights, fair housing, or school equity—you’re watching the grift at work. The antidote is civic muscle: vote, organize locally, demand federal enforcement, and refuse to mistake tokens for transformation.

Cane re-roots Black Republican history in Frederick Douglass rather than in a sanitized Lincoln, and this framing changes how you evaluate today’s claims about the "party of Lincoln." Douglass—formerly enslaved, internationally prominent, and ideologically fierce—treated the Republican Party as a tool, not a tribe. He demanded federal power for emancipation, equal protection, suffrage, and protection from white terror, and he publicly pressured Lincoln when expediency trumped justice.

Douglass’s pressure politics

You see Lincoln as a shrewd politician whose record included early support for the Fugitive Slave Act, a stated opposition to social and political equality in 1858, and flirtations with colonization. Douglass called out these compromises, insisting the war must target slavery, not just slaveholders: "To fight against slaveholders without fighting against slavery is but a half-hearted business." He lobbied for Black enlistment, equal pay for Black soldiers, and immediate emancipation—all to move the moral center and the policy apparatus together.

(Note: Cane aligns with Lerone Bennett Jr.’s critique in Forced into Glory, which resists the myth of Lincoln as pure emancipator and restores the role of Black activism as catalytic.)

Policy planks of the original Black Republicans

The first wave of Black Republicans were not "conservative" in the modern sense. They were emancipationists who believed in race-conscious public power: enforce voting rights and civil-rights statutes; invest in public education; protect communities with federal troops when necessary; expand access to land and wages; and build institutions like HBCUs. Hiram Revels’s fight to seat expelled Black Georgia legislators, Blanche Bruce’s advocacy for desegregating the military and funding Black colleges, and Robert Smalls’s rise from Civil War hero to congressman illustrate a program rooted in collective uplift, not mere symbolism.

Accountability over proximity

Douglass’s method matters for you today: he criticized allies when they failed Black people, a posture that protected principle over proximity. He warned that leaders who abandon Black interests become models for future betrayal. Cane leverages that warning to help you see through the modern grift: when a figure gains access but refuses to challenge harmful party positions on voting, housing, or policing, the pattern echoes 19th-century compromises that cost lives and rights.

This reframing also clarifies what "Black Republicanism" originally meant: not performative diversity or colorblind homilies, but targeted remedies for targeted harms. It sets an evaluative baseline. When someone today appeals to Lincoln, ask what they think about Douglass’s demands—federal enforcement, race-conscious equity, and confrontation with white terror. If those planks are missing, the invocation of history functions as a costume, not a compass.

Modern echoes and misuses

Cane contrasts this tradition with the late-20th- and 21st-century turn to celebrity and tokenism. Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice may be complex and contested, but they largely operated within institutional competence and sometimes crossed party expectations. The new era’s influencers—Candace Owens, Omarosa, Diamond and Silk—often substitute virality for governance and deliver little beyond culture-war soundbites that rationalize retreat from enforcement of civil-rights protections.

Key Idea

Use Douglass’s yardstick, not Lincoln’s myth: demand race-conscious federal action and accountability, and reject proximity that comes at the price of principle.

If you apply this yardstick, much present-day rhetoric about "just wanting opportunity" rings hollow when paired with opposition to voting-rights restoration, fair-housing enforcement, or police accountability. In Cane’s telling, the historical North Star remains the same: secure the ballot, protect the body, and fund the school—then judge all political claims by whether they move or block those goals.

Reconstruction demonstrates both the heights of Black political power and the speed of its undoing when federal commitment falters. You watch a multiracial democracy take shape: the Civil Rights Act of 1866; the 14th and 15th Amendments; the Freedmen’s Bureau; and Union troops preventing massacres and enabling Black men to vote and hold office. Around 80% registration by 1868 powered a governing agenda: public schools, fair wages, and defenses against white violence.

Institutional gains, not symbolism

Leaders like Hiram Revels, Robert Smalls, John R. Lynch, and Blanche Bruce advanced tangible reforms. Revels fought to seat Georgia’s expelled Black legislators. Bruce pressed to desegregate the Army and expand funds for Black colleges. These offices mattered: policy shifted when Black voters and officials held levers of power. The lesson for you is concrete—visibility only changes outcomes when it is tied to enforceable law and resourced institutions.

Backlash and betrayal

Organized white supremacist violence—KKK terror, massacres in New Orleans and Vicksburg—and rule-rigging followed. The Mississippi Plan of 1875 pioneered literacy tests, poll taxes, and "understanding" clauses to block Black men from the ballot. Federal retreat paved the way. The Compromise of 1877 traded the presidency for troop withdrawal, abandoning Black citizens to Jim Crow. Cane indicts Republicans who moderated Reconstruction to court white reconciliation, arguing that elite bargains at the top erased grassroots progress.

(Note: This mirrors Eric Foner’s judgment that Reconstruction’s failure stemmed from waning Northern will and a Supreme Court skeptical of federal power. Cane adds moral clarity: abandonment was a choice, not an inevitability.)

A prototype of the grift in Isaiah Montgomery

Isaiah Montgomery, founder of Mound Bayou, exemplifies how local accommodation can aid systemic disenfranchisement. At Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention, he endorsed literacy tests and understanding clauses, rationalizing that sacrifice would protect his town. The personal payoff followed: elite praise and appointments. Black leaders condemned his role as betrayal. You see a core pattern: local success used to justify broader harms, delivered with a language of realism that masks elite utility.

Why Reconstruction still instructs you

Reconstruction underscores two durable truths. First, rights require enforcement; without federal protection, amendments become parchment. Second, party bargains matter more than soaring rhetoric. When you hear appeals to national unity that sidestep enforcement of civil-rights laws, remember 1877. The mechanics also rhyme with the present: today’s voter suppression tools—aggressive purges, restrictive mail-in rules, gerrymanders—advance through statehouses and courts, just as post-Reconstruction barriers did.

Key Idea

Black political gains scale with turnout, offices held, and federal backing—and they collapse when elites trade enforcement for expediency.

For your political literacy: track not just who wins the White House, but who runs states, who sets voting rules, and who oversees courts. Reconstruction’s radical promise and rapid unravelling reveal the stakes of institutional vigilance—and offer a map to rebuild democratic muscle at the local and federal levels.

After Reconstruction’s collapse, an accommodationist current rose that swapped political demands for limited economic footholds. Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Compromise urged Black Americans to accept segregation and invest in vocational training and business building. White philanthropists embraced him; his personal power grew. Yet critics like W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter saw a bargain that surrendered rights for patronage and prestige, thinning the civic muscle needed to contest Jim Crow.

Isaiah Montgomery’s logic scaled

Isaiah Montgomery’s support for Mississippi’s 1890 disenfranchising constitution, justified as protection for Mound Bayou, became a model of "win small, lose big." His town survived, but Black political power statewide crumbled for generations. Cane asks you to watch for that logic today: a program or endorsement sold as "pragmatic for our community" that, in aggregate, weakens voting rights, fair housing, or policing accountability.

Nixon’s Black capitalism reboot

Fast-forward to the late 1960s–1970s: Richard Nixon repackaged accommodation as "Black capitalism"—a market rhetoric that gestured at empowerment while sidestepping structural remedies. The Office of Minority Business Enterprise and showcase projects promised investment but often lacked sustained support. Floyd McKissick’s Soul City in North Carolina symbolizes the trap: he momentarily allied with the GOP to secure federal backing, only to see the project undermined by conservative power brokers like Senator Jesse Helms.

(Note: Cane echoes Du Bois’s critique of Washington and aligns with contemporary urban-policy scholars who find market-only approaches insufficient to reduce segregation or racial wealth gaps.)

Why market-first solutions underperform

Entrepreneurship matters, but it is not a universal ladder. Roughly one in five Black workers hold public-sector jobs; many families rely on stable wages, healthcare, and pensions. Business creation requires capital, time, and risk tolerance not evenly distributed. Meanwhile, "buying Black" or dangling tax subsidies without guardrails often accelerates gentrification and transfers wealth to outside investors (as later seen in opportunity zones). Without fair lending, anti-discrimination enforcement, and public investment, market incentives will follow profit, not equity.

From Nixon to Trump’s opportunity zones

Cane shows the line from 1970s rhetoric to Tim Scott’s opportunity zones: tax breaks marketed as community revitalization that frequently fueled luxury projects and speculative real estate while bypassing existing Black businesses. Reports from Bloomberg and the Urban Institute documented billions flowing to investors like Michael Milken, while displacement mounted. Scott resisted reforms that would have curbed abuse. The optics—Republicans touting "investment in our communities"—mask the utility: a subsidy to capital that delivers sparse local ownership gains.

Key Idea

Economic showcases without structural policy change become photo ops for elites and vehicles for displacement, not engines of broad-based uplift.

The alternative Cane elevates draws from the Freedom Budget and Poor People’s Campaign: living wages, robust federal housing enforcement, accessible capital for existing firms, and labor power. If you want community wealth, pair enterprise support with rules that protect tenants, require local hiring and ownership, and ban luxury giveaways—in short, structure markets to serve people, not the reverse.

Cane presents Clarence Thomas as the grift’s most consequential expression: a jurist whose personal ascent relied on doors opened by civil-rights struggles and race-conscious opportunities, yet whose jurisprudence often narrows those very avenues for others. Thomas’s path—Department of Education, chairing the EEOC, a brief D.C. Circuit stint, and Supreme Court nomination by George H. W. Bush—shows how conservative patronage rewards a narrow view of discrimination and skepticism toward federal enforcement.

From "high-tech lynching" to high-impact rulings

The 1991 confirmation fight seared a public image. Anita Hill’s testimony alleging sexual harassment met Thomas’s defiant claim of a "high-tech lynching"—a rhetorical jujitsu Cane reads as converting accountability into victimhood. Once on the Court, Thomas has backed limits on the Voting Rights Act, resisted race-conscious remedies, and adopted punitive readings in criminal cases (Cane flags commentary around the Curtis Flowers saga). The pattern aligns with his EEOC tenure, where GAO reports and civil-rights groups criticized lax systemic enforcement in favor of individualizing discrimination.

(Note: Legal scholars have long debated Thomas’s intellectual influences—from Black nationalism to conservative originalism. Cane’s point is narrower: whatever the arc, the outcomes often erode Black political power.)

Ethics, influence, and proximity

Ginni Thomas’s activism—texts to Mark Meadows, proximity to January 6 events—raises conflict-of-interest alarms, further shaking confidence in judicial neutrality. Cane emphasizes that the grift here is not only rhetorical but institutional: when a justice undermines tools like affirmative action or voting-rights oversight, millions feel the effects. The benefit to Thomas is proximity to conservative power and fame; the cost to communities is material—harder access to the ballot, to schools, and to fair adjudication.

The cover story and its cracks

Thomas often frames his views as skepticism of paternalism and a defense of individual dignity. Cane counters that the jurisprudence ignores structural barriers that law must address—barriers Douglass Republicans fought to dismantle with federal power. Dismantling affirmative action while benefiting from race-conscious opportunities is read as hypocrisy; more importantly, the rulings shift lifelines away from future generations who lack the elite networks that now buoy Thomas.

Key Idea

When personal narrative becomes a shield against accountability for systemic harms, the result is jurisprudence that narrows the very pathways the narrative celebrated.

For you, the lesson is to treat robes and resumes as you would any public brand: interrogate outcomes. If a justice’s doctrine regularly cuts enforcement power and dilutes race-conscious remedies, the "self-reliance" philosophy is not neutral; it is a choice to leave unequal structures intact. Cane argues that this is the grift at its apex: the authority of the Court legitimizes a retreat that a TV pundit could never deliver.

Cane dissects a media-political economy that rewards spectacle and elevates "celebrity grifters"—figures who convert identity and outrage into access. In the Trump era especially, loyalty and virality outweigh governance experience. The result is a parade of Black faces who affirm conservative narratives while offering little policy substance, functioning as shields for agendas that restrict voting and dilute civil-rights enforcement.

The performance economy in action

Omarosa’s path—from The Apprentice antagonist to White House aide—shows how reality-TV muscle transmutes into political access. Cane recounts her gatekeeping of Black outreach and her later monetization of insider drama through recordings and a post-White House book. Candace Owens’s YouTube pivot to conservative star, the Blexit operation with generous compensation, and fact-challenged claims (such as mythologies about the NRA’s origins) demonstrate how provocation can outbid accuracy.

Stacey Dash’s commentary at Fox—attacking BET, Black History Month, and leaning on "plantation" tropes—illustrates the reward structure: culture-war soundbites become bookings. Diamond and Silk, Alex Stovall’s hot-mic admission that he privately doubted election fraud while publicly pushing audits, and Herschel Walker’s celebrity candidacy all fit the pattern. The payoff is airtime, speaking fees, and endorsements; the utility is political cover.

Tokenism vs. structural influence

Michael Steele’s RNC chairmanship serves as a foil. He sought to widen the party’s appeal and occasionally criticized right-wing media power (e.g., Rush Limbaugh), and he paid a price in status. In Cane’s telling, token elevation without structural reform becomes symbolic diversity. By contrast, earlier Republicans like Colin Powell or Edward Brooke had institutional heft; they were not simply optics. Under Trump, many experienced Black staffers exited the RNC (Tara Wall, Kristal Quarker-Hartsfield, Raffi Williams, Orlando Watson), leaving a vacuum filled by loyalists and influencers.

Media logic, policy costs

Cable news and social platforms prioritize conflict and novelty. A Black conservative who says "America is not a racist country" draws clicks, which justifies more bookings, which shapes public common sense. But Cane insists you link the spectacle to the spreadsheet: these talking points accompany votes against voting-rights protections, HUD budget cuts, or gentrification-friendly tax breaks. The show changes the rules of the game by numbing audiences to the stakes.

Key Idea

Do not confuse being seen with shifting power. If airtime is not tied to accountable policy action, the "representation" is a shield, not a lever.

For you as a media consumer: build a habit of cross-checking the clip against the record. Ask: Which bills did they back? Which budgets did they vote for? Which investigations did they block or advance? If the answers skew toward restricting access, reducing enforcement, or subsidizing outside investors at the community’s expense, you’re looking at the grift’s media engine in motion.

Tim Scott is Cane’s case study in narrative politics: a polished personal story that sells conservative comfort to skeptical audiences while his record aligns with party priorities that often undercut Black political power. Scott’s line that his family went "from cotton to Congress in one lifetime" performs an America-as-meritocracy parable, positioning him as proof that systems work without systemic reform.

The story and its context

Reporting cited by Cane (notably from Glenn Kessler) adds texture: Scott’s great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather owned land in South Carolina, complicating impressions that his forebears were merely exploited sharecroppers. Land ownership matters for intergenerational mobility. The point is not to diminish hardship but to show how narratives can obscure class differences and policy needs. When a biography suggests bootstrap universality, it can be mobilized to argue against structural remedies.

Votes and policy choices

Cane catalogs a record that sits uneasily with the uplift rhetoric. Scott opposed expansive voting-rights measures, including the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. He proposed a policing bill, the Justice Act, that preserved qualified immunity—leaving a core barrier to accountability intact—despite his own accounts of being profiled. He backed Trump-era priorities at very high rates and served as a key validator on race, particularly with his 2021 response to President Biden asserting that America is not a racist country while Republican legislatures advanced restrictive voting laws.

Opportunity zones in practice

Scott’s signature policy, opportunity zones, promised community investment via tax incentives. Investigations from Bloomberg and the Urban Institute—cited by Cane—show many dollars flowed to luxury real estate and investor-friendly projects, accelerating gentrification rather than fortifying existing Black businesses. Attempts to tighten rules (e.g., Representative Jim Clyburn’s proposed guardrails) met resistance. The results again illustrate Cane’s test: does the initiative enrich current residents or outside developers?

Representation’s political function

Scott’s presence on national stages reassures moderate and white conservative voters that the GOP cannot be racist if a Black senator says so. That symbolic function reduces scrutiny on policies with disparate impacts. Cane’s counsel is to honor personal grit but audit public power. If a leader’s biography becomes a blanket to cover votes that restrict the ballot, weaken civil-rights enforcement, or subsidize displacement, the story is part of the grift’s toolkit.

Key Idea

Origin stories can inspire you—but in politics they also sell policy. Weigh the story against the scoreboard of votes and neighborhood-level outcomes.

If you apply that scoreboard test to Scott’s tenure—especially on voting rights, policing, and opportunity zones—the distance between narrative and consequence becomes the measure of the grift.

Cane closes the loop by moving from diagnosis to prescription: evaluate policy by who benefits, invest in federal enforcement, build voter power locally, and revive comprehensive anti-poverty frameworks. The grift thrives on spectacle; your counter is substance measured in housing vouchers delivered, ballots cast and counted, police reforms enforced, and small businesses financed on fair terms.

Housing, policing, and economic levers

At HUD, Ben Carson’s proposed 14% cuts, efforts to strip anti-discrimination language, and management scandals (costly office renovations, whistleblower retaliation claims) exemplify ideological contempt plus inexperience degrading a critical safety net. In policing, Tim Scott’s Justice Act left qualified immunity intact, while stronger measures in the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act stalled—proof that rhetorical empathy without structural change yields status quo outcomes. On economic development, opportunity zones became tax havens unless governed by strict guardrails barring luxury play and mandating local benefits.

Daniel Cameron’s handling of the Breonna Taylor case—grand jurors later said they were not allowed to consider homicide charges—followed by his role in post-2020 ballot challenges, illustrates how state-level legal power intersects with national party strategy. The signal is clear: personnel and process shape justice. You must therefore track secretaries of state, attorneys general, sheriffs, and judges—not just presidents and senators.

Voter power as policy

Reconstruction’s 80% registration rate and 1868 surge proved that turnout is a structural reform in itself. Modern numbers show what’s possible and what’s at risk: Black turnout exceeded 65% only in 2008 and 2012; in 2020 it reached 62.6% with 12% voting Republican, followed by a flood of restrictive state bills in 2021. That is not coincidence; it is strategy. Cane directs you to organizations that turn theory into practice—Black Voters Matter, Fair Fight Action, Color of Change, the NAACP, National Urban League, National Action Network—because consistent local work across cycles is what blunts suppression.

A revived Freedom Budget frame

Borrowing from A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King Jr., Cane endorses a modernized Freedom Budget: living-wage floors (with subsidies for small firms in distressed areas), accessible public jobs, strong housing and lending enforcement, and targeted access to capital for existing local businesses. Pair that with labor power (see Paul Prescod’s argument that Black gains widen when unions and the welfare state strengthen) and you get a program that helps the many, not just the few who can start companies.

(Note: This approach aligns with scholarship showing that federal action—from the New Deal to the Civil Rights era—has historically underwritten major Black advances when paired with vigilant enforcement.)

How you apply the book’s test

• Follow the money: Does a proposal deliver budget dollars, enforcement staff, and measurable benefits to current residents?
• Audit the record: Track votes on voting rights, policing accountability, and housing rules—not just speeches.
• Organize locally: Prioritize statehouses, secretaries of state, and school boards; off-year elections decide access to ballots and books.
• Demand accountability: Reward leaders who challenge their own party to protect Black interests; penalize those who trade silence for proximity.

Key Idea

Treat voting, budgeting, and enforcement as a single ecosystem. If any leg is weak, the grift finds daylight; if all are strong, communities gain durable power.

Cane’s last word to you is pragmatic optimism: the grift prospers in flash and fog, but it loses to organized, evidence-driven politics that make federal power work the way Douglass demanded—toward liberty, safety, education, and voice.