Guess Who's Coming to Dinner Now?

“An excellent overview” of African American, LGBT, and other minority-group conservatives (The New Republic).

In Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Angela Dillard offers the first comparative analysis of a modern conservatism that cuts across boundaries of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

To be an African-American and a conservative, or a Latino who is also a conservative and gay, is to occupy an awkward and contested political position. Dillard explores the philosophies, politics, and motivation of minority conservatives such as Ward Connerly, Glenn Loury, Linda Chavez, Clarence Thomas, and Bruce Bawer, as well as their tepid reception by both the left and right. Welcomed cautiously by the conservative movement, they have also frequently been excoriated by those African Americans, Latinos, women, and LGBT people who view their conservatism as betrayal.

Dillard’s comprehensive study, among the first to take the history and political implications of multicultural conservatism seriously, is a vital source for understanding contemporary American conservatism in all its forms.

“Dillard analyzes the famous (Clarence Thomas, Linda Chavez), the obscure (Elizabeth Wright’s black conservative newsletter, Issues and Views) and the in-between (the memoirs of the gay conservative Marvin Liebman).” —The New York Times