Customer Reviews

Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character

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Ward Connerly is an amazing guy who totally "gets it." His critical thinking, demonstrated time and time again in this book, places him on absolute par with Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, two of the countries other amazing African American thinkers, authors and professors of fair play for all! Connerly's book should be required reading in all California schools just to counter the slanted view of "quotas by race, gender and ethnicity" foisted on the public for decades, quotas which have almost destroyed the fabric of my state! Hear, Hear, for Ward Connerly, a guy who not only gets it, but a guy who has and is doing something about it! His book speaks volumes regarding honesty, fairness and a way out of the incredible mess that political correctness has created!

Ward Connerly is a great American whose leadership in ensuring equal opportunity for all is well known. The book provides insight on Connerly's formative years and the critical moral and practical lessons he learned from his Uncle James. Concise, touching, and elevating, this volume is very strongly recommended.

Length:: 5:39 Mins

Excellent book that's right up there with Clarence Thomas's My Grandfather's Son.

By Rachel Alexander

Ward Connerly, best known for taking on preferential treatment on the basis of race, gender, and ethnicity beginning in 1996 with California's Proposition 209, recently came out with a second book. Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of Our Character is about the most influential person in his life, his Uncle James who raised him as his own son. It was Uncle James's parenting that planted the seeds in Ward which ultimately led to his crusade against affirmative action. Uncle James's no-nonsense, no-complaining allowed upbringing, combining love with hard work, instilled within Ward a highly disciplined work ethic that went counter to the affirmative action mentality of blaming someone else for your situation. The short book is beautifully written in the same elegant and powerful speaking style Ward is known for, pulling the reader in for a quick read that flows more like easy-to-read fiction than nonfiction. There are fascinating parallels to My Grandfather's Son, by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was raised by his strict grandfather. Although both Ward and Justice Thomas were not raised by their paternal fathers, they were fortunate enough to have a relative step in to provide that important father role sadly missing in many black families today.

Deserted by his father at a young age, Ward lost his mother soon afterwards to a stroke. His Uncle James (the husband of his aunt Bert) took him in, and he spent the rest of his childhood living with Uncle James and Bert or his grandma. Uncle James never saw people in terms of color. Yet some of Ward's own family members spoke disparagingly of Uncle James behind his back because he was darker-skinned than they were. Observing this unjust cruelty taught Ward very early on that any kind of racial discrimination was wrong.

Uncle James had an uncompromising moral code and work ethic. Even though he worked in manual labor his entire life, due to a third grade education, he never felt the "stress" associated today with strenuous work. He thought that the coffee break was the worst invention since it allowed people employed in government bureaucracies paid by his hard-earned money to "sit on their fat a*** smoking cigarettes." When he'd see someone sitting on the side of a street with a sign, "will work for food," he'd mutter, "Well then, just put down the d*** sign and go get yourself a job."

Uncle James taught Ward that if you didn't neglect the small things in life, the big things would fall into place. He carried a gun to protect himself, because a "mane has got to defend himself and his family, else he ain't no mane at all!" (his pronunciation of man) Ward frequently jokes that due to his lack of education Uncle James wouldn't have known the difference between the Second Amendment and the Third Amendment, he had a grounded inner sense of what was right.

Uncle James was selfless. He never talked about himself and treated everyone as friends, not strangers. He spoke with contempt about acting like a "big shot."

Uncle James had no use for the term "African-American." When he heard the phrase, he'd say, "Sh**, I bet he's never been to Africa and ain't about to go. Those Africans don't want nothing to do with him." Uncle James resented affirmative action, calling it a handout. "If they got up off their butts and worked, they wouldn't need no affirmative action." He thought the Black Panthers were con men and gangsters.

Uncle James considered Afrocentrism the equivalent of witchcraft. "I'm a black man and that's all there is to it. I don't know a d*** thing about Africa and I don't want to know. All I know about Africa is it's where we would still be if our ancestors didn't get lucky back all those years ago and get brought to America."

Although Ward grew up very poor, his Uncle James never let him feel sorry for himself, and taught him how important it was to "be a mane" and work. The life of Ward Connerly is a true Horatio Alger story. As a boy growing up, he spent summers with Uncle James working at a sawmill. They would start the day beginning at 5:00 am preparing breakfast, in order to be at the job site by 6:45 am. Then little Ward would pick up strewn soda bottles all day long, return them to the grocery store for refunds, and bring back more sodas for the workers. He says it was this little chore that introduced him to the world of capitalism and private enterprise.

While living with his grandma, some days Ward would go without lunch, and there were weeks where all he would have for dinner was a slice of sweet potato and some collards from the garden. He would stuff cardboard in his shoes when the soles started wearing out. At one point his grandma was forced to go on welfare, and had Ward as a teenager apply for it since she wasn't quite old enough to qualify. That didn't suit Ward, who soon told the social worker that was enough, and he went out and "became a mane," getting a job as a stock boy and waxing floors while in school - making more money than he'd been receiving on welfare.

Church played a big role in Ward's life. Uncle James made sure Ward attended church every Sunday both morning and evening. Ward became very involved teaching Sunday School.

When Ward went to college, he was elected student body president, the first black student body president of Sacramento State. He writes that he didn't think of himself as a "trailblazer;" one of the reasons he wanted the job was it paid $35/mth and came with parking privileges. Uncle James agreed that it wasn't anything monumental, "You don't have to see your color all the time. If others do, that's their problem. Best thing is to just get along with life."

Ward still didn't have it easy in college, he had to work to put himself through. During the summers, he would work 8 pm - 3 am nights on an assembly line and half-days as a children's recreational supervisor.

Ward's beloved Uncle James passed away in 1996, the same year Ward's Prop. 209 initiative banning preferential action on the basis of race, gender and ethnicity passed in California. Ward reminisces that if Uncle James had lived long enough to hear someone tell him to "celebrate diversity," he would have shot them a withering look. Ward shudders to think what Uncle James would have thought of Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright, who told his congregation "God damn America."

Having been raised by this impressive colorblind uncle, it is easy to understand why Ward became a champion of treating everyone as individuals, not as members of groups based on their skin color or gender. As Ward perceptively frames the issue in language for today's era, "It is often said America is 'a nation of immigrants,' but I believe this characterization causes us to misplace our focus. America is a nation of individuals."

(Rachel Alexander and her brother Andrew are co-Editors of Intellectual Conservative. Rachel practices law in Phoenix, Arizona and blogs for GOPUSA.com. She has been published in the American Spectator, Townhall.com, Fox News, and other publications.)

If I hadn't read Creating Equal this book would have seemed like a puzzling compilation of childhood anecdotes. With the background, I could appreciate the influence of the "lessons", and Connerly's childhood in general, on his success as an adult. An excellent example of the importance of stable, male figures in the household.

Mr. Connerly introduces us to his Uncle James and it is a very heartwarming experience. I enjoyed getting to know a man whose independence and drive epitomizes all that is truly American. As a southerner, I only regret that he had to go to California to find the freedom he needed to live as only a man like he must live.

Excellent. I am a student getting my teaching credential in California. Professors are constantly trying indoctrinate us into thinking that minorities have a disadvantage, tests don't mean anything, whites are privileged, whites are always rich, blacks are always poor, Hispanic are always stereotyped, etc. Proof-my (Black) professor tried to "warn" me that Connerly is a Black activist in disguise and that I should go to his book signing event with caution because he abolished affirmative action. This book made me remember there was a time, growing up in the south, when I called everyone "Sir" or "Ma'am". He was right about California-we get comfortable with the cavalier attitude about manners. When I moved to CA, I lost that respect for others. As Connerly stated in the book, it's hard to argue with someone you just addressed as "sir".

I purchased this book since I was to see the author in a week and needed something for him to sign. As I read through the book it became difficult to put down. I heartedly recommend this book and it will not only make you cry but feel good.

In this short book, Mr. Connerly has but one message, but he says it repeatedly, and he says it very well. I think every black that has grown up in and managed to escape the South alive as he did, can relate with great empathy to his story. I did not have an Uncle James but I did have an Uncle Nathaniel, a stepfather and grandfather all of whom imparted the same healthy and often stern moral teachings that Mr. Connerly received from his Uncle. And here the author does more than just enshrine and pay homage to the past moral world of his uncle James. He turns it into a full-fledged anti-black race-based reverse ideology, not at all unlike that of racist whites who have for generations used the same close-minded ideological stance as a wedge in the American culture wars.

The trick he employs skillfully and with great effect even if perhaps unwittingly and ever so subconsciously, is to divide blacks (he never talks about whites except to mention that his wife is white) into two mutually exclusive groups: those blacks that are morally like him and his Uncle, and then all the rest - the liberals, the ghetto deadbeats, the unwed mothers, etc.

It is this facile and very much caricatured division of black humanity into only these two mutually exclusive groups -- one that lives with optimism, purpose and decency; the other ever-whining with their hands out, morally decadent and unwilling to do an honest day's work for a day's pay - that allows him to live a life with a lethally dangerous and split-off mentality. This seriously compartmentalized mindset appears to be an affliction only of far right conservatives, whether black or white. The most obvious symptom of the disease, in addition to dividing the world into neat binary black and white pigeonholes, is that upon seeing the two-sided coin of racial preferences - with white preferences on one side and black preferences on the other -- far right conservatives are congenitally incapable of seeing the side in which the advantages go to anyone other than the most recent claimants, blacks. In their eyes, Black Affirmative Action (but not White Affirmative Action) is the last great evil of the 21st Century, except that it just happens to be the other side of the same coin that gave us a half millennium of "cumulative" white only preferences.

In this walled-off mental world with its built-in double standard, black racial preferences are seen as the very incarnation of pure evil and a symbol of complete moral decadence itself. And surely if left unattended even for a minute will destroy the American nation as we have come to know it. However, the cumulative damage of a half millennium of white racism based on a world of white only preferences is of course, of no consequence; it is ignored altogether. The white side of the racial preference coin (White only Affirmative Action) might as well be the dark side of the moon.

That conservatives, whether white or black, choose not to deal with the inconsistency of their position on racial preferences, simply means that they cannot be taken seriously. For it undercuts their carefully built ideological castle by exposing it as having no clothes and as having been built of moral quicksand.

I will not belabor the point any further, however, I do think it is less than honorable for the author to have used his dead Uncle as a strawman to setup his anti-affirmative action arguments. Surely a man from his uncle's era would not have had the kind of modern split mind that Mr. Connerly has himself, but attributes to his uncle.

Five Stars for the writing, which is very good indeed; two for the ideological low-blow credited to Uncle James.