In America, a black intellectual only joins the human race by joining the right wing.  I had almost said when he votes Republican.  Nearly all the other black "thinkers," their writers and other disseminators of ideas, excluding maybe Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama, are too caught up in the black question to join the rest of us.  Thus the majority of their works, if not all of them, are focused on black people and the police, or black people in history, or black people in business, or black people in politics.  There's no Thomas Sowell, who's known primarily for his works on economics, or Voddie Baucham, known primarily for his lectures on Jesus and Homeschooling, or Ben Carson, known primarily for his work on brain surgery.  Instead we get a slew of one-trick-ponies and racial narcissists, the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Brittney Cooper, Shaun King, Al Sharpton, James Baldwin, Jesse Jackson, and Michael Eric Dyson.  The primary way a black man gets ahead in the Democratic Party is by cutting himself off from the rest of humanity; by whittling himself down to something so small, so specific, so niche, that it can only appeal to black men such as himself, or to white people looking for glorify themselves for loving black people.  A huge market, really, but the best one only to spiritual and intellectual midgets.

But a black Republican is bigger than this.  He has ideas that are good for whites and Chinese and blacks alike, and when he talks about being a free man he inspires white men to free themselves alongside him.  His cause is our cause, and our cause is his.  He sees our rise as his rise, and views himself so favorably, and so equal with the strongest of us, that he believes less laws, less protections, less encumbrances for everyone in general, will make him more vibrant and successful, not less.  He considers the last four hundred years of history not just as a tragedy, but as a gymnasium.  They've made him stronger, harder, smarter than many of the rest of us; and the chip on his shoulder isn't for the whites who no longer oppress him, but for the blacks who are jealous he's risen above them.  He knows who's trying to drag him down, and he responds accordingly -- by cutting their government cheese funds, and mocking their bastard children, their saggy pants, and their work ethic.

Because of this he's viewed as a race-traitor.  But is he?  His sheer self-respect commands respect from the other races.  He does what affirmative action programs intended, and the opposite of what they've actually done: to make people consider the black issue as something more than an issue: to flesh it out, with all the dignity of bearing, and real thought, and know-how, and elbow-grease; to take part in America not as a pity-case, but as a free citizen, on par with Jimmy Stewart, or Ronald Reagan.  A black Republican is someone who heard his life was terrible and that he was a door-mat, to which he replied it isn't and he isn't, which led a lot of leftists to hate him.  His grandfather escaped the racists only to have him persecuted by the anti-racists.  The inferior blacks want him to keep saying they're oppressed.  The white leftists need inferiors so they can feel like they're heroic.  Thus his only natural allies are men who need him to prove himself.  He finds these in the Republican Party: men who like him if he's solid, laugh at him if he's an idiot, and hate him if he's a jackass.

On top of all this a black Republican is gracious.  You have to be to live happily in America, where leftists waterboard you with films, lectures, and books about racism until you cry uncle, making you feel raped if you're a black person, and like Hitler if you're white.  The black Republican knows this and moves along anyway, taking one white man at a time, judging him, good or bad, based on how the white man treats him, and how he carries himself, and what he's good for.  The Democrats deified Martin Luther King Jr. and excommunicated the black man who took "I have a dream" seriously.  He hates whining, and gun-grabbing, and race-baiting -- he knows that some men are damned and others are saved, and that handicapping the best of us is no way to better the worst of us.  He feels comfortable in a good white middle-class neighborhood, but not in a lower-class trailer park.  He loathes the ghetto, and does everything he can to keep his children far away from it.  In short he's not just a good black man, but an exceptional man in general.  I wish there were more of him.  And I'm glad to hear that every day, there are.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.