I met actor Joseph C. Phillips last year when we shared a discussion panel with Shelby Steele (author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era) on race relations. At one point during the Q&A, Phillips lost his temper with someone in the audience. He admonished the person for failing to acknowledge that America’s Founders, regardless of their faults, had the right ideas. Individual liberty, freedom of expression, due process, etc., are objectively good principles, even if the Founders hadn’t intended to apply these principles to blacks.
Phillips had committed the “sin” of publicly expressing gratitude for being an American, despite America’s history of slavery and subjugation. His new book, He Talk Like A White Boy, is a semi-autobiographical collection of essays about his love for this country and his respect for the “old school” values that make America strong. Recurring themes are family, faith, and freedom.
Best known for his roles as Lt. Martin Kendall on “The Cosby Show” and Justus Ward on the soap opera “General Hospital,” Phillips is a rarity in Hollywood. He writes candidly about growing up speaking proper English (”talking white”), being different from the mainstream, and having his “blackness” questioned.
The opening anecdote of the 232-page book sets the tone and reveals what eventually becomes a lifelong frustration. After he made a comment in his junior high school accelerated English class, another black student said, “He talk like a white boy!” What does that mean? Phillips thought. Instead of chastising the girl or dealing with the substance of the remark, the teacher merely corrected her grammar.
“No, LaQueesha. Joseph speaks like a white boy!” The teacher had the entire class repeat the correct sentence. “[T]hat moment,” writes Phillips, “was not only the beginning of junior high school, it was the beginning of my life.”
Phillips began to recognize what he calls the “tyranny of opinion” — the idea that a self-anointed group stood at the doors of culture and determined who was or wasn’t black enough. As a conservative columnist and speaker, Phillips receives his share of letters and e-mail from members of this group who sling ad hominem attacks (usually anonymously) but rarely deal with the substance of his work. “In their minds,” he writes, “I no longer speak like a white boy, I now think like a white boy.”
He Talk Like A White Boy is replete with examples of this tyranny in action. Phillips recounts a nasty experience on a TV talk show called “America’s Black Forum.” Between segments, a black liberal journalist let loose with a profanity-laced, personal rant against him. “Imagine if I had cursed at Deborah Mathis in front of a studio audience,” Phillips writes. “My inappropriate behavior would have signaled the bankruptcy of my arguments. To the guardians however, Deborah’s inappropriate and unprofessional behavior is seen as a righteous defense of the race.”
Such a defense is considered righteous to many blacks. Criticizing negative elements of black subculture is “airing dirty laundry,” and holding opinions different from mainstream blacks is traitorous.
Airing more dirty laundry, Phillips decries the emphasis on sports in the black community over academics. “Doing well in school and reading books become anti-black, joining the debate club instead of the basketball team is anti-black as well.” But Phillips doesn’t criticize others just for the sake of it. His book is textured with honest details and examples of his own faults, and he doesn’t rationalize his wrong-headed decisions.
Phillips stays focused on the book’s themes while writing honestly about his anxiety over auditioning, his mother’s suicide, and his efforts to be a faithful Christian, a good husband, and a good father. In a poignant essay about his late father, Phillips laments the diminished role of fathers in the culture in general:
It is a shame that as social currency, fatherhood has been so drastically devalued. A man’s honor is cheap—Boys must see the pride in their father’s smile, feel the firm hand of a father’s discipline, and hear the bite of correction in his voice. Boys will not grow into men unless men lead them—Boys do not need male role models and they don’t need father figures; they need fathers in the home.
Despite the “race traitor,” “Uncle Tom,” and “self-hater” name-calling, many black conservatives understand and share the desire to identify with our racial group. “[N]o matter how successful, educated, or integrated we become, we still seek out images and stories that reflect some sense of who we see when we look in the mirror,” Phillips writes. But that doesn’t preclude telling the truth.
Phillips injects humor into serious subject matter with laugh-out-loud tales about his attempts to be “cool” while conceding that he’s “corny.” For readers interested in a black actor’s perspective on Hollywood, He Talk Like A White Boy will definitely satisfy. Phillips has met and formed strong friendships with many well-known actors. However, the name-dropping is not boastful; it’s instructive. He shares his struggle to be a working actor who doesn’t compromise his values or accept demeaning roles.
He Talk Like A White Boy is one man’s story of love of family and country. Readers looking for a forthright — and sometimes painful — account of being a black conservative won’t be disappointed.
Originally published at National Review Online on June 2, 2006
