The Dell Gines Interview

Starting the Conservative Brotherhood

Way back in 2005 I was Cobb, as in Old School Cobb. At the time of this interview I was still running The Conservative Brotherhood. It’s good to look back upon where I’ve been, and this is very decent snapshot of what it was like at the time.

As a Stoic, I have disarmed several of the guns I was shooting off at the time, but it’s important for those who follow me to understand what was novel and fresh during that moment. So if you are new to my contemporary writings, I think it is useful to understand what kind of ideological and intellectual woods and mountains I’ve hiked before. I have learned that I am always a contingent being, and that I am driven to understand more. For me it’s all about ‘do’ not about ‘be’. So here is a peek at what I have done. Dell Gines is still around somewhere.

Cobb Interview

First Tell us a little about yourself?
I grew up in Southern California and have very vivid memories of the
late 60s. We spoke Swahili at home and celebrated kwanzaa at the very
beginning of the movement. Pops was a scholarly nationalist. I was the
oldest of five kids and we grew up in a neighborhood overrun with kids.
I attended catholic school and was a ‘brainiac’. I did the
scholar-athlete thing in highschool but all I really cared about was
computers, soccer and diving. Still, I tended to be philosophical even
then. I wondered why everybody else’s folks weren’t serious about the
Movement. I worked four years out of highschool then worked my way
through a computer science undergrad at the state U. I got involved
heavily in campus and national student politics through NSBE which
really changed my life. I went overboard with Thomas Sowell even though
I had worked with the Rainbow Coalition. I did the Joe College stuff
big time making up for lost time.  I wound up at Xerox Systems Group and
became an evangelist of sorts for their technology. It all made perfect
sense to me. After Xerox fumbled, I decided to work as a field
consultant. It was all about building systems where the customers were.
I haven’t changed much on that score. I was king of the Buppies during
the 80s - pretty much all the way through. BMW, Nordstrom’s wardrobe,
American Express card.. the whole deal.

I moved to NYC in 1991 after the death of my brother and watched the LA
Riots from Brooklyn. I pretty much abandoned the Buppie scene in ‘90
and started indulging my artistic sensibilities. Read a lot of the Critical
Theorists, and Blues Aesthetic. Wrote a lot of performance poetry and
got online to do community work. Also my discovery of what was going on
in Namibia, Oliver North’s crap and the invasion of Grenada put my
patriotism on ice. So I was doing the whole Chomsky bit for a while. I
settled in around Cornel West in an attempt to be what he was trying to
be when he cut his extra wack hiphop album.

Marriage and kids pulled me out of the radical mode and in 1994 for the
first time I got serious about making money. Finally, it wasn’t about
me. I was 33 at the time and realized how simple life could be. I’d say
that fact and reading Gwaltney really changed my perspective about
blackfolks.

I moved back to California in 1997 and soon did the whole Silicon
Valley thing. All these years, since 92, 93 I had been on the internet. At
Xerox, before that, I ran the internal Blacknetwork. It was all a part
of my writing life which started back in 1982. It was the performance
poetry that gave me the courage to say what I really believed in front
of people, so I’ve always been fearless online.

What gave you the idea to start the Conservative Brotherhood?
It was a long time coming really. I mean for a decade I’ve been looking
for a community of blackfolks who did some serious intelligent writing
about the issues of the day. It wasn’t until the invention of blogs
that folks who have been there all along had the ability to control their
online environment enough to get out the cogent thinking that had been
going on.

From my perspective, the Conservative Brotherhood needed to be because
what conservative blacks were and are saying is more important for the
nation to hear than the standard liberal and progressive lines. I
believe that we are the only ones creating new opportunity for
blackfolks - we’re felling trees in a new direction, everybody else is
on safe, plowed under ground.  So I borrowed a relatively tried and
true idea, a blog league (I had already joined the Bear Flag League) and
said let’s do it.

I had already tried and failed to create a grass roots web community. I
bought the domain oldschoolrepublicans.net and built it, but nobody
came. I had been hanging out on Yahoo and various other public forums
but I wasn’t particularly impressed. In fact I went to Project 21 as
well, and I just didn’t see that they had the bandwidth to handle all
the issues in a form appropriate for my interests. In the end it had to
be bloggers.

Who are the members, and how were they selected?
I sent out emails to the black right of center bloggers I respected the most. { Booker Rising, Lashawn Barber, Duane Brayboy (Black Informant), Tavares Forby (Black Pundit), Desmond Hunter, Michael King, Ambra Nichol, Juliette Ochieng, Joseph C Phillips, Samantha Pierce (Uncle Sam’s Cabin), Darmon Thorton, Avery Tooley, and Scott Wickam. } Every one of them was an independent thinker, a proven blogger, a good writer and beholden to no one. It was very easy to see who these folks
were. Everybody accepted, and we were off.

Where do you see the Conservative Brotherhood going down the line?
I have committed to help build a portal site which will RSS all of TCB
posts and then attaching a commenting community to that. It should work
pretty much like Daily KOS in structure. As the members do their own
thing, the notoriety should grow - I certainly plug it when I’m invited
to speak. We registered with NZ Bear as a blog community. We’ll
probably have another round of inductions this year. We lost Michael King to big
media and he’ll be missed, but time marches on. I think the outlook is
bright.

We’ll probably collaborate to get a little more specific on policy
positions and common shared values and their implications. But we have
done well in being a diverse group of right opinions without any kind
of orthodoxy or litmus tests that cause unnecessary friction. That’s
important because we said from the first that there are plenty of
different kinds of right of center African Americans. We are actually a
pretty broad coalition.

What does being a ‘black’ conservative mean to you?
It means headaches. Being a black conservative is painting a target on
your head - it’s unconventional and something of a radical move. People
simply don’t believe that blackfolks are in their right mind to be
conservative. As soon as you start representing that way you enter a
new realm and it’s very easy to get in trouble - not because of what you’re
saying, but because you are saying it at all. There are very few
conservative ideas that blackfolks haven’t heard or acknowledged, it’s
just that American notions of what a black man or woman can get up and
say in public is very limited, and this is a direct consequence of
racial stereotypes against us. But again, the problem is mainly one of
deportment. Can you stand up saying out loud what you really believe
without making a fool of yourself?