COLUMN ONE : Blame, Not Excuses, for Rioters : The reaction of black conservatives to the L.A. violence reflects a philosophy of personal discipline, self-help and disdain for the ‘poverty industry.’

In all the commentary on the Los Angeles riots, few words have been harsher than those from black conservatives.

“On the first night, the police should have been out there with shoot-to-kill orders,” declared economist Walter E. Williams. Mayor Tom Bradley and Gov. Pete Wilson, he added, “should be impeached for dereliction of duty.”

Or consider this from the newspaper column of Thomas Sowell, a scholar at the Hoover Institution: “It is bad enough when genuine racial polarization exists. It is unconscionable for the media to create it by depicting the actions of hoodlums, thugs and looters as representing either the actions or the views of the black community.”

These two stern voices and other maverick black thinkers offer opinions about the Los Angeles riots, urban poverty--indeed, about how blacks should fit into American society--that clash profoundly with those of the civil rights Establishment and liberals of all races.

In a time of great agonizing over the trouble in urban America, the conservatives wish to provide a counterpoint to the conventional wisdom of many black leaders.

The contrarians are more likely to rebuke rioters, for instance, than make excuses for them based on injustice or racism.

They emphasize self-help and personal responsibility rather than dependence on costly government programs as the best strategy to combat poverty in rundown urban neighborhoods.

And they retain faith in private enterprise as a strong elevator of upward mobility. By contrast, they insist, the whole web of liberal social services, such as welfare, has become a self-sustaining “poverty industry” that does more good for middle-class bureaucrats, researchers and social workers than it does for the needy.

“If you aren’t shamed by the horror of the Los Angeles riots, then nothing can shame you,” declares Elizabeth Wright, editor of Issues & Views, a black-oriented conservative newsletter based in New York.

Perhaps the most prominent of the contrarian voices belongs to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. The most influential theorists include Shelby Steele, the San Jose State University professor of English who says liberals have encouraged blacks to see themselves as victims; Robert L. Woodson, an urban activist who presses for the poor to take more control of their lives; Glenn Loury, a political economist at Boston University; Williams and Sowell.

They command no real movement and by all accounts remain much less influential than established civil rights groups, which earned their following in bruising battles against segregation. Surveys show, after all, that black Americans are much more likely to view government as a helpful social force and to identify with the Democratic Party than do Americans overall.

Still, there is another, often overlooked streak within the black community--one centered on church-based values and concern about crime--which gives heart to the iconoclasts.

Blacks, for example, oppose abortion in about the same numbers as whites, surveys show. Except for the death penalty, they support tough anti-crime measures--such as allowing police to search the homes of drug dealers without court orders--by similar margins to the nation overall.

Indeed, one-third of blacks described themselves as “conservative” in a new poll by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and Home Box Office; 30% said they were politically moderate and 29% liberal--similar to findings for whites in other polls.

Viewed With Suspicion

Black Americans “tend to view themselves substantially more conservatively than we conventionally assume,” observed Milton D. Morris, vice president of the Joint Center, a Washington-based think tank on black issues.

Part of what makes the outspoken black conservatives so controversial, however, is that many blacks also view the very word “conservative” with suspicion. The principles of self-help and government aid sometimes get tangled up at the street level, where many believe ongoing social ills cry out for both approaches.

“Business as usual--I think that’s what comes to the minds of a lot of people in the neighborhoods when you start talking about ‘conservative,’ ” said Leighton Hull, a businessman who owns two McDonald’s franchises in Lynwood.

Yet there are aspects of Hull’s own life that would seem to place him in the conservative camp, even as they coexist with his other, moderate views.

He stresses old-fashioned values in the workplace--checking up on the report cards of his student employees, for instance, and requiring them to maintain a C average in school or risk being suspended. For five years, Hull himself saved up money toward his first franchise by sharing a one-room apartment with his wife, though they could have afforded something larger.

“I’m conservative in a lot of ways,” concedes Hull, a political independent. But he’s also quick to add that the up-by-your-bootstraps view of extreme ideologues is “meaningless in a hopeless home, meaningless in a home with little or no self-esteem.”

To some conservative apostles, the world seems less ambiguous; they find gangs and violence easy to condemn.

Sowell, whose economic writings were popular in the Ronald Reagan Administration, took issue with those who have referred to the Los Angeles mayhem as an “uprising,” informing readers of his newspaper column that 58% of blacks surveyed said the riots were “totally unjustified” (an apparent reference to a Times Poll of blacks in Los Angeles).

Williams, a professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., declares mischievously: “The black leaders say one thing, and the people say something else. Black people have more in common with Jerry Falwell, while black leaders like Jesse Jackson and (U.S. Rep.) Maxine Waters have more in common with white hippies.”

A Long Tradition

In key ways, the conservatives are following a tradition that goes back to Booker T. Washington, the slave-born educator who counseled self-help and personal discipline as ways for blacks to attain economic self-sufficiency in America.

By early in this century, Washington increasingly was viewed as too willing to accommodate a racist U.S. society--a charge that dogs his ideological heirs to this day. A competing, more activist, view, championed by W. E. B. Du Bois, held that genuine racial progress required that blacks push for new legal rights and political reforms.

His approach, rather than Washington’s, provided much of the thinking behind the civil rights movement that was to reshape America in the 1950s and 1960s, with its epic legal battles and protests to desegregate the South and promote equal opportunity.

“So fully has the Du Bois agenda been consolidated within the portals of the civil rights Establishment that Booker T. Washington and his present day admirers are now viewed with a mixture of curiosity, pity and derision,” notes conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza, an Indian-born research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

True-believing conservatives argue that while the civil rights movement has had proud victories, its agenda is mostly exhausted now that 1990s realities of urban crime, broken families and a fast-changing economy call for different approaches from people and their government.

Up to Parents

Williams, for instance, says low-income parents can help themselves stay above the poverty line if they will just hold off having children until they can afford them. And if they have kids, he says, it’s up to parents to lay down the rules: do your homework, go to bed on time, eat a decent breakfast.

“You tell me,” demands the economist, “what government program can do that?”

When it comes to government, the conservatives don’t all see things the same way--Loury and Steele, for instance, are less hostile to government than Williams and Sowell.

But a recurring theme is that less bureaucracy, not more, would help the poor.

As some of the conservatives see it, government’s role is to remove costly legal hurdles for would-be entrepreneurs--for the industrious have-not who wants to use a rattletrap auto in business and the most humble of street vendors. Williams points to licenses for operating taxi cabs--which cost many thousands of dollars in some cities--as an example of government roadblocks that harm poor people who want to get ahead.

Others who duel with liberal orthodoxy place their emphasis on non-traditional approaches to black empowerment.

Woodson, president of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, seeks ways in which disadvantaged people can gain greater control of their lives and neighborhoods, such as by managing--and ultimately owning--public housing projects. He also is raising money for a new corporation intended to finance business ventures in major U.S. cities.

A product of the civil rights movement, Woodson derides what he calls the “poverty industry,” claiming that for all the billions of dollars spent in aiding the nation’s poor, their problems seem to have gotten worse.

“Is there a correlation there?” he asks, well aware that such a question can stir a storm of protest. “People who make their living in the poverty industry do not want these questions raised, and (white) conservatives who raise them aren’t doing so to find answers--they’re doing it to defend their inaction.”

Critics accuse the maverick thinkers of selling out--of spreading a message that comforts the white power structure and fails to understand the needs of the poor. Their many opponents say the black conservatives overestimate the ability of the downtrodden to pull themselves up in a racist society and are blind to the value of political action.

“I get two kinds of mail that frighten me,” says Loury--hate mail from blacks who consider him a “sell-out” and fan mail from white racists. The continual friction takes a psychic toll. “You have to wonder,” the Boston University political economist mused in an interview, “have I gone off the deep end?”

Roger Wilkins, a history professor at George Mason University, says the conservatives take too much credit for the notion of self-help. “They act as if they invented self-help, and they talk as if self-help is the only answer,” he said. “Self-help is part of the answer, and government help is another part of the answer.”

After all, he noted, Jesse Jackson--hardly a symbol of conservatism--has counseled greater self-discipline and personal responsibility for years. “The fact is that black people have been involved in self-help activities since the beginning of slavery,” Wilkins observed.

Still, some items on the non-traditional agenda may be striking a chord among black Americans.

Under a “school choice” program launched in 1990, for example, hundreds of low-income children in Milwaukee have attended private, non-religious schools. The approach, still experimental and controversial, has long been high on the conservative agenda for education.

“This year when we put (information) in the newspaper and the radio, people were calling all day long,” said Ruthie Terry, an aide to Wisconsin state Rep. Polly Williams, a black legislator who has championed the program. “It was astonishing.”

Loury, for one, prefers to think that time is on his side. He points to the hostile crowd he faced at Harvard University one night two years ago to make his point.

The sort of spirited, black nationalistic views held by many in the audience who heckled him actually dovetail with his softer-spoken themes of self-help and self-sufficiency, Loury contends.

From the teachings of Malcolm X to strident rap lyrics there may be an important, common--and little-recognized--thread with today’s black contrarians: The refusal to see blacks as dependent wards of a white-dominated society.

“That gives me hope,” Loury said.