Ta-Nehisi Coates is a gifted writer and powerful polemicist, but his greatest strength seems to be in his ability to provoke fierce debate. Whether arguing for reparations for blacks or for Trump being the “first white president,” I have encountered no black public figure in the last decade save perhaps President Obama himself who forced writers on the right to defend, argue, and discuss ideas related to race and politics.

Some of the right’s criticisms have merit. Coates’ arguments tend to lack a sufficient measure of nuance as well as an incapacity to be informed by shades of grey. They often reduce the full and incredibly rich experience of Black America to nothing but oppression, of an almost cosmic, eternal sort. His arguments, moreover, bespeak a certain despair and lack of real direction forward. And yes — on occasion his work could benefit from tighter editing, though that’s true of many great writers.

Yet these attacks miss the core point: We on the right can disagree with every last one of Coates’ policy proposals. We could reject his Manichean understanding of racial relations. We could do all that, but we would still be forced to concede every last one of the historical facts he presents, facts conservatives gloss over far too often.

The Harsh Historical Reality

The cold, hard facts — which Coates repeatedly relates with admirable depth, clarity, and detail — are these:

For much of U.S. history, Black Americans inhabited a moral, legal, and societal universe which was a warped mirror image of how White Americans experienced the United States and how the United States saw itself. This reversal is so pervasive that I might even call the general Black American framework the anti-American Dream.

There is hardly an aspect of American life which was not horribly distorted. The Constitution which secured rights and freedoms for Americans assured that most Black Americans had none whatsoever until 1865. The federal governmental system which ensured a diffusion of liberty in order to prevent federal abuse also secured the systemic legal oppression of Black American citizens in too many ways to count until the 1960s. Policemen charged with ensuring fair enforcement of law and order among free citizens often served as agents of violent oppression and even as killers of the black citizens they were supposed to serve and protect.

The American Dream invoked men pulling themselves up by their bootstraps by working hard and attaining success; for Black Americans, working hard as slaves only benefited slave owners, and after emancipation it was a great way to get killed or ruined by jealous whites angry at the success of people they considered their inferiors. Lynching was as likely to befall successful black businessmen as any falsely accused rapist of white women; riots as likely to be aimed at destroying successful black neighborhoods as any rumors of violence against whites.

Things are no better when we consider the American Dream of the mid-twentieth century many conservatives still pine over. That Dream — fueled by the federal subsidy of housing, education, and entitlements like Social Security — was specifically designed to deny Black Americans the same leg up.

This warped reality even spilled over into America’s mission to the world. The United States went to war in 1917 “to make the world safe for democracy” while denying its Black American citizens voting rights it had promised them in a Constitutional amendment decades before. It went to war in 1941 to fight a malevolently racist regime with a rigidly segregated army.

Political Complexities

This is the reality of Black American life in the United States prior to the Civil Rights revolution in the 1960s. Yes, there is more to the story. Yes, Black Americans contributed to the country in a variety of ways and served it through thick and thin. Most continued to at least try to love it. But the distorting dark mirror was always in the background and in the foreground of the life of even the most conservative, accommodating Black American. We can debate how to deal with this reality; we cannot deny it existed.

Yet conservatives are desperate to do just that. When they do not slip into outright apologia for slavery or Jim Crow, conservatives try a few main tracks to somehow, someway make it all go away.

All of them fail.

One attempt tries to peg the fault for all of what I’ve described to Democrats and “leftists.” This will not do. Yes, Democrats — certainly those in the South and many in the party’s progressive wing — bear a great deal of blame for perpetuating this evil, as they deserve credit for finally smashing that regime through its liberal wing. But this was an evil in which the whole country was complicit, Republicans included.

The same Republican Party which passed the crucial 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments ending slavery, guaranteeing citizenship, and assuring the vote for Black Americans also agreed to the “reconciliation” of 1877, withdrawing federal troops from the South and ensuring that those rights became nothing but empty promises for America’s black citizens. When Henry Cabot Lodge proposed a “force” bill in 1890 to ensure that black voting rights receive federal protection, Republicans — who held the White House and both houses of Congress at the time — abandoned it for economic deals.

Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge were genuinely committed to civil rights in rhetoric and policy; Herbert Hoover tried to court southern votes in 1928 by attacking anti-lynching efforts. Republican Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen played a crucial role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964; most southern Republicans (yes, they did exist) voted against it in the House. The Republicans, then, are not entirely blameless or entirely praiseworthy in their handling of Black American civil rights prior to 1965.

The Folly of Year Zero

The second attempt to try to wave away the historical reality of Black Americans in the United States was an approach similar to that of Germany after 1945. The idea is to see 1965 as Year Zero. Everything before that year is situated safely behind us, and we are all starting afresh. Ideas such as the enduring “legacy” of slavery or Jim Crow are anathema, silly concepts invented by leftists who aim to use “identity politics” to poison the American body politic.

It’s a nice story, and left-wingers are certainly not blameless in taking real racial problems and amplifying them for their own purposes. But once again — this won’t do. If the left played none of the kind of tribalizing identity politics the right bemoans, that legacy would still be there.

Indeed, conservatives should know better than to speak of the past as a tabula rasa. Isn’t the animating heartbeat of conservatism a respect for the richness of the past? Aren’t we constantly discussing the enduring positive and negative legacies of historical events far more distant in time than the historical oppression of Black Americans? Hardly a day goes by when I don’t see talk of the legacy of Rome, or the legacy of communism, or the legacy of crucial wars.

Well, Black American history is a legacy, too. We and they are no more than five generations removed from slavery. We and they are no more than one or two generations from the pre-1965 era. White Americans often speak of their ancestry and their history and the traditions and memories they bear from it. For Black Americans, this is an enormous part of theirs. It’s not the whole story by any means, it’s not the sum total of their being, but it’s a central, unavoidable plotline.

Legacies and traditions are not magical, mystical things. They are everyday and commonplace. They are the concepts, rules, and habits taught by our parents, friends, and surrounding society. They are the historical stories and societal attitudes passed down from generation to generation, giving shape to our self-conceptions. There is no need to turn to left-wing agitation or political correctness to understand that the legacies and traditions of Black Americans were fundamentally shaped by their experience through America’s dark mirror. Indeed, it’s so obvious, it shouldn’t even need to be said.

The Year Zero approach fails not just because racial discrimination and bigotry did not at all disappear as a force in the United States, as Coates and other writers from the left to the center-right have convincingly shown time and again. It fails because it is a denial of human nature and our relational capacities which conservatives in particular have always stressed. To take the Year Zero approach is to deny the fundamental truths of conservatism and humanity in the name of assuaging white guilt. It will not do.

The First Step Forward

I believe the time has long passed for a truly conservative approach to racial challenges — one which acknowledges the uncomfortable facts and absorbs them, even if we propose different solutions than the left does. I plan in a series of essays to go subject by subject, from the issue of law enforcement to reparations to human moral equality, to make the case that conservatism is not just a matter for comfortable and dominant majorities or the powerful. It is a universal matter of humanity and justice.

Some conservatives will no doubt scoff at this. I can hear it now: “What’s the point? After all, liberals will never acknowledge what we say! We’ll always be racists to them. And besides, minorities will never vote conservative, so your efforts are wasted! Let the liberals worry about ‘their people.’”

To quote America’s first Black President and paraphrase Israel’s First Prime Minister: Let me be clear when I say that I don’t care what the liberals say, I care what conservatives do. I didn’t become a conservative to win a popularity contest or beg for adulation. I did so because I believe it is the right approach. If anyone on the left lacks the decency and the fairness to encourage efforts on the right to end bigotry and hatred, instead preferring to smear and hound such efforts for genuine or cynical reasons, that’s on them. Conservatives believe in virtue. There is nothing more virtuous than doing the right thing regardless of popular opinion.

As for whether minorities will ever vote conservative again — I still don’t care. Why should this consideration or influence my decision to write what I think is right? Maybe the bridges with non-White America have been well and truly burned after 2016. Maybe outreach might someday be possible. I don’t claim to know whether the future of conservatism will have any purchase within non-white demographics. I do know that it’s irrelevant to the health of America. America’s dark mirror first and foremost harms America as such, regardless of who’s in power.

Liberals and Democrats alone cannot smash it. No party remains in power forever in a healthy democracy, and for Black Americans to truly become secure, support for ending their unjust treatment must become firmly bipartisan. This is true not only when it comes to the political parties, but more importantly the voters who ultimately determine who gets elected in primaries and general elections, and what they will do in office. The right and left can and should disagree over solutions and policies in a healthy manner — but we must start learning to agree on the facts.

It is to this effort, and the smashing of the dark mirror, that this series is dedicated.