Impóne, Dómine, cápiti meo gáleam salútis…

Bless you, Father, for you were there.
In the shadow of my burnt-out home,
embers taunting about the air.

In the cold of my midnight cell,
my brokenness, my shame,
impossible to hide,
impossible to bear.

At the back of the rig on which I leaned,
as I had nothing left in me,
nothing more to give,
nothing still to be.

Bless you, Father.

✠

Dealba me, Dómine, et munda cor meum.

Bless you, Father, for you came,
when all the world withdrew, withheld,
simply walked away.

You sat down, remained.
You listened, prayed,
and heard that harrowing silence
that only haunts the brave.

Bless you, Father.

✠

Praecínge me, Dómine, cíngulo puritátis.

Bless you, Father, and thy sacred hands.
Wizened by time.
Hallowed by chrism.

Those hands that held aloft the salvator mundi.
Those hands, large enough to hold the whole world,
outstretched, wounded,
much like His.

Into thy hands I commend what I had broken.
Hands formed of the sod of Leitrim.
Hands meant to polish, bless.
Thine were the hands reaching up from rubble.
Hands that saw and punted Death.

Bless you, Father.

✠

Redde mihi, Dómine, stolam immortalitátis.

Bless you, Father, for night draws near.
And like the sea, too cold to care,
too vast to see them drowning
in the wake of ships too near to flee.

Yet, like Him who dared tread Galilee,
you braved The Pestilence in search of me.
Alter Christus.

Reaching out into the hearts of Men,
until, at last, you saw the end.
The End.

Lord, take me where You want me to go,
let me see who You want me to see.

Engine 73 & Ladder 42.
So you were led to them in need,
to them who cried and bled
and knew
that they, one day —
one day soon…
for greater love hath no man than this.

Bless you, Father.

✠

…ab omni vínculo delictórum.

—J. Anthony McAlister
11 September 2026

^A.M.D.G.

✠

✠

✠

a brief note on publication

Friends, despite a brief interruption, the serialisation of Sinfonia Apologia resumes with the third instalment: movement iv, ‘kinship’.

If you are joining us only now, welcome. Here follows a brief note to orient you. As a whole, this essay runs to some twenty-five thousand words, essentially half a novel in length, arranged as eight movements bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. I am publishing it as a serial precisely because so much of what it asks of a reader deserves to be sat with rather than consumed in a single sitting. The prologue & first movement were published on 14 August; I would ask you, before proceeding here, to begin there, instead. As with a symphony, this really only makes sense upon hearing the first notes.

For those of you returning, thank you for accompanying me on this journey and for whatever quiet reflection you have already given these words so far. What follows now takes up where we left off.

The serial continues through this weekend and will conclude over the next week. Please, as before, read each portion as it comes, and allow it settle before the next one arrives.

Welcome back, friend. It’s good to have you here.

-Anthony McAlister
28 August 2026

. . .

movements

prologue
i. the pretzel
ii. on the plantation
iii. inheritance
iv. kinship
v. on sovereignty
vi. roots
vii. the argument
viii. reckoning
epilogue

. . .

iv. kinship

. . .

I was in high school when I first encountered the work of Joseph de Maistre, the Savoyard philosopher and diplomat whose writings form, alongside Edmund Burke’s, the foundational texts and intellectual moorings of traditional conservative belief. I cannot now recall precisely how he came to me, whether through a teacher, a library shelf, the ramblings of one of my preternaturally learned friends, or one of those providential accidents of reading that shape a life without announcing themselves at the time. What I do recall is the effect. Here was a mind that refused, with a rigour by which my attention was immediately arrested, the central assumption of the so-called Enlightenment: that human reason, properly applied, is capable of constructing a just and stable social order from first principles. De Maistre regarded this assumption as considerably worse than mistaken, an outsized and misplaced form of intellectual hauteur, dangerous precisely because it flattered its own confidence, that, when translated into political and social action, had produced, was producing, and would continue to produce unmitigated catastrophe. He had watched, with horror, the French Revolution devour its own children. He had seen what happened when men decided that the accumulated wisdom of centuries, embodied in institutions, traditions, the academy, and the authority of the Church, was mere superstition to be swept aside in favour of abstract rational schemes. He was in no way surprised by The Terror. He had seen it creeping near from the very beginning. For de Maistre and his ilk, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité was a disingenuous, cynical, and ultimately dangerous rallying cry deployed to give cover to man’s ultra vires usurpation of legitimate sovereignty, by any means necessary and at any cost.

. . .

What de Maistre offered in place of Enlightenment rationalism was something at once more humble and more profound than mere obscurantism or reaction for its own sake. Truth, he insisted, is received rather than constructed: through revelation, through the living witness of historical experience, and through the accumulated moral knowledge of a civilisation that has learned, at considerable cost, what human nature actually is rather than what we might wish it to be. Organic institutions, he argued, those that have developed slowly over time and adapted to the realities of human life, are always to be preferred to written constitutions imposed from above, however elegantly reasoned and wrought. The natural law, which he understood as the innate moral architecture of very creation itself, cannot be repealed by legislative fiat or revolutionary rumbling – only violated, and the violation always exacts a price.

. . .

Edmund Burke, for whose writings and philosophy de Maistre functioned for me as a kind of gateway drug, understood this as well, and presented it with a beauty that de Maistre, for all his fire, never quite managed to achieve. It was Burke who gave me what I have come to regard as the most complete and most honest understanding of what human society actually is: a sacred covenant, he wrote, not merely between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who have gone before, and those who are yet to be. This simple, yet achingly beautiful sentiment I genuinely regard as one of the most radical and most necessary ideas in the history of political thought. It compels us, in all our sophistication and knowledge and, yes, enlightenment, to consider and, indeed, accept that we are not the authors of the world we inhabit. We are its stewards, temporary custodians of some precious thing inherited from people we have never met and yet are obligated to pass on, intact or improved, to people who do not yet exist. Our debts run in both directions. We owe unto the dead the respect of not casually dismissing and cruelly discarding what they built at such terrible cost. We owe unto the unborn the decency of refraining from pulling down the walls and leaving to them the detritus and debris.

. . .

. . .

This understanding of society as a partnership existing across the whole of time lies at the very heart of everything I have come to believe about institutions, about tradition, about the family, and about the proper limits of any one generation’s authority to remake the world according to its own often myopic and shallow preferences. It is why I loathe revolution, all revolution, in both principle and practice – not merely those of France, but the permanent revolution that the progressive Left have been steadily fomenting within Western societies for the better part of a century. Revolutions, by their nature, require the destruction of existing institutions as a precondition and metric of success. They must delegitimise what is before they are free to impose what they deem ought to be, in their estimation. According to their lights. On the basis of their reason. And they always, with a regularity that history has now rendered axiomatic, produce something worse than what they replaced. The wolf who comes after the shepherd is invariably hungrier than the one who came before.

. . .

Clemens von Metternich, whom history has treated more harshly than is merited, understood the inherent value of the balance of power as a conservative achievement in its own right, the assertion that no single nation or ideology should be permitted to dominate the European order of the day, because the ambition to dominate always ends in the attempt to transform, and the attempt to transform has a penchant for slouching towards violence. Juan Donoso Cortés, far less known than he ought to be, saw in the revolutionary movements of his own century the outlines of something he could only describe in theological terms: the will to remake human nature itself, to produce by political means the perfection that Christian theology and anthropology place solely in the life to come. These were the minds that slowly, yet irretrievably, shaped my understanding of what conservatism actually is. In time, I came to understand it as the political disposition most naturally aligned with mankind’s intrinsic worth, and the one most capable of sustaining what actually builds and preserves a civilisation.

. . .

Thus, the unearned caricature of conservatism as a soulless defence of privilege, a mechanism of oppression and injustice, or a nostalgia for some imagined golden age gone by was, for me, dismantled by these dead European men and replaced with something far sturdier: an honest recognition that human beings are fallen creatures. Our best institutions were never built by grand design; they were built by the slow, painful, costly accumulation of experience and wisdom, and to discard such precious inheritances in the name of so-called progress is not liberation. It is suicidal amnesia.

. . .

. . .

Yet, philosophy of this kind, however provocative and bracing, risks remaining rather an abstract thing confined to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a museum of dead European men, all admired from a comfortable distance. What made it live and rich and tangible for me, what turned inheritance into instinct, was the close examination of the lives of four extraordinary people considerably closer to my own century, none of them philosophers by trade, each of them proof that the thing de Maistre and Burke had described in the abstract was still, in living memory, being lived out by particular men and women against particular and often vicious resistance.

. . .

I was eight years old in 1990, when Margaret Thatcher was treacherously edged out of 10 Downing Street, much too young to have any real sense of who and what she was, let alone any opinion of her at all. My first substantive encounter with her came years later, at a high school lunch table full of fellow magnet school classmates considerably more precocious and reliably vociferous than I was. Alas, memory will not reveal to me the precise prompt that compelled a brilliant yet utterly unpersuadable friend of mine to launch into a passionate indictment of the Iron Lady’s legacy: the Falklands, the miners, the stratification of British society for which blame was readily thrown at her feet. I listened, and while listening noticed something: everyone at that table with a strong opinion of Mrs. Thatcher had inherited it, the way I had once inherited my own vague political identity, from atmosphere rather than investigation. So, I did the very thing I was soon to do again in my investigations of Catholic doctrine, and would do once more, decades on, when honestly grappling with my own country’s politics. I went looking for her in her own words rather than the oft-malign verdicts of her critics, and found her, of all places, in Hansard, and proceeded to read her speeches free from the imposition of anyone’s external interpretive scaffolding. I soon found myself, and have remained to this day, tremendously impressed. Thatcher came from a solidly middle-class family in a country and at a time when that meant something rather more constraining than it does here and now. Yet, in the face of those constraints, she rose, entirely on the strength of her own conviction and by the force of her own considerable will, to become the longest continuously serving British Prime Minister of the twentieth century, and, I would argue, the greatest since Churchill. Her core conviction, that human beings, left free of undue interference and meretricious attempts at social engineering, have room in which to accomplish extraordinary things, animated every position she held. I think it not a coincidence that the fiercest opposition she faced regarded her conservatism itself as the disqualifying fact, in precisely the way I would later observe on this side of The Pond with Janice Rogers Brown. Margaret Thatcher was, by even the most niggardly of accounting, a woman of genuine historic firsts. That her critics so rarely lead with this, and instead so consistently present her as Scrooge in a smock, tells you a great deal about which of the two facts actually offends them.

. . .

. . .

Margaret Thatcher was indeed a conservative heroine of mine, and yet my affinity for her, particularly in those early years, was constrained somewhat by the feeling I could not fully identify with her. Happening upon the extraordinary life and accomplishments of Lincoln MacCauley Alexander, however, provided me a more immediately tangible conservative role model whose background I, at least in part, felt I shared. Alexander, whom precious few American readers will likely have heard of, made perhaps the deepest impression on me of all four, in large part because his story belongs to no American mythology I had been spoon-fed and digested. Born in Toronto to West Indian immigrant parents – his father a master carpenter in his homeland yet permitted only to work as a railway porter in his adopted land, his mother a tender, devout, longsuffering housemaid – Alexander grew up within a rigid Canadian racial stratification most Americans are shocked to learn their northern neighbour ever employed. He served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, enlisting the same year the service’s race restrictions were finally dropped, one of a documented handful of Black Canadians to do so. He became, in turn, the first Black member of the Canadian House of Commons, the first Black federal cabinet minister, and the first Black person to hold vice-regal office in Canada as a Lieutenant Governor, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s official representative in the Province of Ontario.¹ None of this came easily, none of it came early. Upon graduating from law school, no law firm in Ontario would hire him, not for any deficiency of talent or intellectual prowess but for the plain fact of his race; yet rather than wait for permission that was never going to come, he opened his own practice and built it into a powerhouse. He joined the Progressive Conservative Party at a moment when it held considerably little appeal or representation for Black Canadians, not despite that fact but because of it, choosing to reform an institution from within rather than accept exclusion from it or worse, abandon it to its baser instincts. His own coat of arms, granted comparatively late in his life, bears the motto Confidence, Determination, Perseverance: three words that, knowing the man and his story, strike me as less a slogan than an honest description. I never had the chance to meet Lincoln Alexander, and yet I owe him more than I owe most people I have.

. . .

. . .

. . .

If it was some measure of comfort or solidarity I was unconsciously seeking in casting about for conservative leaders who reflected both my ethnicity and class, it would not be long before I discovered, to my delight, that, while not quite a pantheon, there did indeed exist, and to a considerable degree is extant, a truly laudable roster of men and women of colour for whom mere colour is in no way the determinant of their beliefs. Encountering Dr. Thomas Sowell, who, thank God, though well into his 90s is still with us, gave an intellectual architecture to things I had already begun, however haltingly, to suspect were true. My barrister bookcase proudly boasts an entire shelf of his works, each one greedily devoured and each one, in its way, a miniature graduate seminar in intellectual honesty. Sowell was raised in near-crushing poverty in North Carolina in the early part of the 1930s and then in Harlem after his family relocated, lost both parents while young, and was forced to withdraw from high school before graduating in order to work, eventually completing his diploma via night school, a setback that would likely have imploded most people’s ambitions yet merely rerouted his. He was, for the whole of his young adulthood, an avowed and serious Marxist, and I think this is important to pause and reflect upon because his eventual conversion from that sinister ideology is, I think, the single most remarkable and methodologically important story among these four profiles in courage. In the summer of 1960, whilst working as an intern at the U.S. Department of Labor, Sowell was assigned to study the effects of minimum wage laws on employment within Puerto Rico’s sugar industry, and found, to his own evident discomfort, that the law was measurably increasing unemployment among the very workers it was meant to protect.² It was not a lecture that moved him, but the data itself, examined honestly and followed wherever it led, regardless of what he had previously believed or wished to be true. That discipline, to trust the evidence over the ideology, to trust the outcome over the stated intention, has defined the whole of his subsequent career, and I do not think it is an overstatement to say it is the single method I have tried hardest to make my own throughout every paragraph of this essay, including those that proved the most difficult to write honestly.

. . .

. . .

Clarence Thomas rounds out this quartet of latter-day conservative worthies, and I have rather a good hunch his inclusion here will unnerve certain readers far more than anything else in this movement, which I confess does not trouble me in the slightest for reasons you will hopefully soon understand. Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, a small Gullah-Geechee community founded by Freedmen. To the surprise of most, he did not grow up with English as his first language; he spoke Gullah, sometimes called Geechee, an English-based Creole particular to the Sea Islands, until he was well into childhood.³ He was raised largely by his grandfather after the age of six, educated in various Catholic schools, and was, from that same Catholic formation, never a convert but a cradle believer, carrying his faith the way he has carried everything else in his public life, without apology and without display, refusing either to hide it or to perform it for an audience that would prefer one or the other. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1974, one of roughly ten Black students in a class of one hundred and sixty. Yet the achievement curdled almost immediately, as recounted in his memoir: hiring interviewers in his third year asked, in his words, pointed questions unsubtly suggesting that they doubted he was as smart as his grades indicated, forcing him to conclude bitterly that a law degree from Yale bore, for a Black graduate, the taint of racial preference regardless of the work that had actually earned it.⁴ He has kept, ever since, a fifteen-cent price sticker from a cigar wrapper affixed to the diploma’s frame, stored in his basement rather than displayed; forever a reminder, in his own telling, of the degree’s diminished worth in the eyes of the men who might have hired him.

. . .

. . .

President George H. W. Bush in 1991 nominated Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. He was ultimately confirmed that same year, but only after being subjected to a confirmation process of a viciousness that had, until that point, no real precedent in American public life.⁵ He was offered, more than once, the chance to quietly withdraw rather than endure what was to follow, yet he refused, electing instead to decry the proceedings, in words that have outlived the men who orchestrated them, a “high-tech lynching”. I do not believe he was wrong.

. . .

Presently, he has sat on the Court longer than any of his colleagues. Yet, despite this remarkable tenure, he has regularly been purposefully maligned by those on the left as intellectually incurious for the simple reason that he famously declined, for many years, to engage in performative enquiry for the benefit of media microphones during oral arguments by questioning the lawyers appearing before the Court, preferring instead to closely evaluate the substance of the arguments presented in lawyers’ written briefs. And yet, he remains, by any objective reading of his jurisprudence rather than his caricature, one of the most prolific and consequential legal minds of his generation. He is, I think, living proof of a point I have strained to make throughout this essay and will argue yet again before it ends: that the fury a Black conservative elicits from a certain class of so-called Progressive is rarely about the substance of his positions and almost never about his competence. It is about the very fact of him. It is about what his mere existence, unbothered and unrepentant, implies about everyone who insisted he could not exist at all.

. . .

. . .

I shall pause here, ever so briefly, as this movement has now twice raised a subject without engaging it directly, and because I think the distinction matters enormously. There is a considerable difference between the desegregation of an unjustly racially stratified or exclusionary institution and what came to be called, a generation later, affirmative action, and I think the collapsing of the two into a single undifferentiated category under the loose classification of civil rights has done actual damage to the clarity with which this country is able to discuss either of them. The Los Angeles Fire Department, to take an example close to my own experience, maintained racial segregation as policy until the mid-1950s. Black firemen were prohibited from serving alongside White firemen and, in fact, were only permitted to be stationed at just two Black-only firehouses. This strict separation therefore meant that, either by design or inevitable happenstance, Black firemen, regardless of their courage or competence, were denied the same opportunity to rise in rank as enjoyed by White firemen. The organisations that eventually fought back against that ghastly status quo, and won, were not asking for the bar to be lowered. They were asking for the same bar, applied to men who had already cleared every test the department administered and had been told, regardless, that the uniform itself was not for them. That is a documented historical wrong, remedied by documented historical struggle, and I honour the memory of that struggle.

. . .

Affirmative action, as I observed it and as I came to oppose it at age fifteen, is a wholly different act, and the difference is not a matter of degree but of kind. It does not ask that a closed door be opened. It presumes the door is already open, and then alters, by administrative or legislative fiat rather than by the individual’s own effort, the terms on which the competition behind that open door is judged, on the theory that the individual cannot be sufficiently relied upon to clear the existing bar without some quiet adjustment being made on his behalf. I have looked and have yet to locate the compassion within that theory. I have only ever been able to discern the condescension, the paternalism that the second movement of this essay has already laid out at length, applied here not by a stranger in an anonymous comment section, but by an institution that believed itself to be helping. Mr Justice Thomas’ fifteen-cent sticker is what that condescension looks like when it has had four decades to compound. I recognise the shape of the isolation that produced it, having met my own version of the same at fifteen, cut off at an instant from people who had called themselves my own for daring to refuse the part I had been assigned to play. Neither of us was accused of the same thing. Yet, both of us learned, at the moment it mattered most, exactly how lonely that refusal could leave a man.

. . .

Let us leave the argument where it lies for a moment, because I think it belongs there, and turn our attention to a similarly problematic episode that occurred only this summer.

. . .

In July of this year, the prestigious one-hundred-and-twenty-two-year-old Stuyvesant High School in New York City, among the most academically demanding public schools in the country, released the racial breakdown of its incoming class of freshmen. Of seven hundred and seventy-seven offers, three went to Black students.⁶ The breathless reportage and outraged commentary that followed arrived exactly on schedule, from exactly the two directions one might have predicted: some read the number as self-evident proof that the admissions process itself must be broken, requiring intervention; others read it as self-evident proof of something considerably more sinister, an innate ceiling on what Black students could be expected to achieve at the advanced end of the academic pool. I confess I find both assessments much too easy, and I’ll tell you why: because I think the actual data, rather than either faction’s distillation of it, relates a more difficult and more honest story than either was willing to broach.

. . .

. . .

Black students were not, as I discovered, a negligible sliver of that year’s applicant pool. They made up roughly a fifth of all students who sat the admissions exam, the second-largest group tested, larger, in fact, than the number of White students who sat for the very same.⁷ The door, in other words, was not closed. What happened behind it was this: of that considerable pool, only a small fraction converted to an offer, at a fraction of the rate of what White and Asian test-takers achieved from pools of comparable and lesser size. I confirmed, independently and to my own pronounced discomfort, the specific number beneath this: on the most recent national assessment of twelfth-grade mathematics, the share of Black students in this country scoring at the advanced level does not merely round down. It rounds, per the government’s own reporting convention, to zero. Nada. Zilch. Goose egg.⁸

. . .

I present that number, not entirely without flinching, because I do not think an essay built according to the rubric of strict intellectual honesty is entitled to look away from a fact merely because that fact is unwelcome. But I must also be equally exacting about what that number does and does not establish, because this is precisely the point at which both camps in the Battle of Stuyvesant High, I think, went astray. The number does not prove an inherited ceiling; the scholarship on that question, examined objectively rather than emotionally, points overwhelmingly away from genetics (ahem, paging Dr Cofnas) and toward the concentrated poverty, the underfunded classrooms, the unequal access to the kind of preparation wealthier families have means to purchase without a second thought, that shape a child’s mathematical education years before any admissions exam ever enters the equation. But the number equally does not prove that the exam, or the door it guards, is the thing in need of correction. A gap this wide, surviving contact with a pool this large, has nothing to do with the gate itself. Its true cause lies further back, in all the things that happened long before a single student ever arrived to be tested.

. . .

This is, I have come to believe, the fundamental and quite specific error in the case for affirmative action, stated with far more devastating precision than I could muster at fifteen. Affirmative action intervenes at the door. It cannot intervene anywhere else because by the time a student is old enough to fill in an application, whatever produced the gap in his preparation has already had a decade or more to do its devious work, unwitnessed and unaddressed. I did not arrive at this distinction from behind a lectern somewhere on the seventh floor of my ivy-clad ivory tower. I arrived at it the way I have arrived at nearly every point herein laid out, by turning over, once again, the particular insult of being repeatedly and emphatically told that the door itself was the problem, when I already knew, in whatever way a fifteen-year-old knows anything, that the wound long predated the door. Widening the door, lowering what it takes to pass through it, touches nothing upstream of it. It leaves the actual wound exactly where it was, while offering the appearance of treatment, which may be the most damning thing that can be said of any putative medicine.

. . .

. . .

I am not the first person to notice the shape of this error, and I take a certain grim comfort in the company I keep in having noticed it. In November of 1947, a frightfully young Leonard Bernstein, newly appointed to lead the New York City Symphony, wrote an essay for the New York Times addressing the near-total absence of Black musicians from the country’s major orchestras.⁹ He had gone looking, in his own words, for how many qualified Black candidates existed to be hired at all, and found the honest answer considerably more troubling than the initial question: not a single major American orchestra, at that time, employed one. Bernstein’s assessment was not that the audition process discriminated, though, in those days before “blind” auditions were normative, who can really say? No, his assessment was that there ought to be better qualified teaching available throughout the whole of the nation, so that Black musicians and those who would be musicians could avail themselves of it, long before any audition was ever scheduled. Seventy-nine years separate Lenny’s essay from a Manhattan school building I have never once set foot in, and yet the two are asking precisely the same question, refusing precisely the same shortcut. How many qualified candidates exist, and why are there not more, and what, if anything, happens before the audition, before the exam, before one ever reaches the door, that we have been unwilling to examine because the door itself was so much easier to blame? That, my friends, is the hard nub of it. Answer that fundamental question, and so-called affirmative action will, at last, be shown to be the insulting, dehumanising contrivance it has always been.

. . .

notes

^{1. “Lincoln Alexander.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Accessed 2026.}

^{2. “Thomas Sowell.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Accessed 2026.}

^{3. “Pin Point, Georgia.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed 2026.}

^{4. Clarence Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (New York: Harper, 2007).}

^{5. “Clarence Thomas.” Biography.com, A&E Television Networks. Accessed 2026.}

^{6. Stuyvesant High School Fall 2026 admissions data, New York City Department of Education, and contemporaneous press reporting.}

^{7. Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) applicant and offer data by race, 2022–2023 admissions cycle, New York City Department of Education.}

^{8. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2024 Mathematics Assessment, Grade 12, National Results, Achievement Levels by Race/Ethnicity, National Center for Education Statistics.}

^{9. Leonard Bernstein, “The Negro in Music: Problems He Has to Face in Getting a Start,” New York Times, November 2, 1947, X7.}

. . .

bibliography

^{Bernstein, Leonard. “The Negro in Music: Problems He Has to Face in Getting a Start.” New York Times, November 2, 1947.}

^{“Clarence Thomas.” Biography.com. A&E Television Networks. Accessed 2026.}

^{“Lincoln Alexander.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Accessed 2026.}

^{National Center for Education Statistics. National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 2024 Mathematics Assessment, Grade 12, National Results. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences.}

^{New York City Department of Education. Specialized High Schools Admissions Test (SHSAT) Applicant and Offer Data by Race, 2022–2023 Admissions Cycle.}

^{New York City Department of Education. Stuyvesant High School Fall 2026 Admissions Data.}

^{“Pin Point, Georgia.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Accessed 2026.}

^{“Thomas Sowell.” Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Accessed 2026.}

^{Thomas, Clarence. My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 2007.}

. . .

to be continued…

. . .

a brief note on publication

Sinfonia Apologia continues today with its second instalment: movements ii & iii, ‘on the plantation’ and ‘inheritance’.

If you are joining us only now, dear friend, a brief note to orient you. As a whole, this essay runs to some twenty-three thousand words, arranged as seven movements bookended by a prologue and an epilogue. I am publishing it as a serial precisely because so much of what it asks of a reader deserves to be sat with rather than consumed in a single sitting. The prologue & first movement were published just days ago; I would ask you, before proceeding here, to begin there, instead. As with a symphony, this really only makes sense upon hearing the first notes.

For those of you returning, thank you for accompanying me on this journey and for whatever quiet reflection you have already given these words so far. What follows now takes up where we left off. Nota bene: It asks a little more of you than did the beginning. Yet, as you will see, your patience shall be amply rewarded.

The serial concludes on Saturday, the twenty-second of August. Please, as before, read each portion as it comes, and allow it settle before the next one arrives.

Welcome back, friend. It’s good to have you here.

-Anthony McAlister

. . .

movements

prologue
i. the pretzel
ii. on the plantation
iii. inheritance
iv. kinship
v. on sovereignty
vi. roots
vii. the argument
viii. reckoning
epilogue

. . .

ii. on the plantation

. . .

Still with me? Good. Because there is so much more to say.

. . .

On the twentieth of August 2021, the Los Angeles Times published a column, penned by one vituperative Erika D. Smith, a Black woman, under the following headline: “Larry Elder is the Black face of White Supremacy. You’ve been warned.” That headline, despite the righteous furore it fomented, stands to this day: unaltered, uncorrected, and unapologised for. I want to keep it in view as we proceed, because everything I shall lay before you in this movement is, in one way or another, a gloss upon it.

. . .

There is a word that has been hurled at my feet, and at the feet of people who look and think like me, with a frequency and a casualness that I find, even now, remarkable. It is not a word I shall avoid in these pages, because avoiding it would be its own kind of dishonesty, and, as I have already promised to you, I am done with all that. The word is ‘sellout’, and it travels in company: ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘race traitor’, ‘Oreo’, ‘house nigga’, and on, and on, and on. I have been called more than one of these things, sometimes to my face, quite often behind my back, in places I was not meant to know about, and sometimes even by people who presented themselves, in the very same breath, as my putative allies. I want to examine that word carefully, because I think it contains, if you press upon it just hard enough, the whole of what it is I wish to say here now.

. . .

To call a Black man of a particular outlook, bearing, temperament, and worldview a ‘sellout’ is to make a categorical claim about what Blackness requires of him. It is to say that there exists a set of political positions, of cultural attitudes, and of social allegiances that are not merely the common, shared milieu of Black folk but mandatory, and that to deviate from them is not to exercise one’s freedom, intellectual or otherwise, but to betray one’s people, and in so doing, one’s very Blackness. It is, in other words, to insist that Black Americans are not individuals possessed of our own minds and our own moral agency, but rather members of an unwieldy monolith whose worth is conditioned upon ideological compliance. We must be very precise about this, because precision matters here more than rhetoric: that insistence, wherever it originates and however it is dressed up, is racism. Not racism-adjacent. Not racism of a complicated or contextual kind. Racism, full fat and raw. Racism, by any honest definition of the word, which has always meant, at its very core, the reduction of a person to their racial category and the presumption that the category then determines what the person is permitted to think, to feel, to become.

. . .

What makes this particular strain of racism so especially corrosive is its source. It does not come, in the main, from, ahem, the usual suspects. It comes, with a consistency I have spent decades observing quite closely, from the political Left. It comes most especially from White so-called progressives, who have cultivated, with apparent sincerity and seemingly blissful ignorance, a form of racial paternalism so thoroughly embedded in their assumptions about Black identity that it has become invisible to them, like furniture so long in place one has ceased to notice it is there.

. . .

This is not a merely impressionistic observation, and I want to be clear about that before proceeding, because a claim of this kind, made by a Black conservative, will be received in certain quarters as self-serving complaint rather than honest analysis. So, permit me to lay the evidence before you before I state the argument.

. . .

In 2019, psychologists Cydney Dupree of Yale and Susan Fiske of Princeton published findings, drawn from five controlled experiments involving more than two thousand White participants, that White liberals systematically presented themselves as less competent when addressing or interacting with Black people than with White people. Democratic presidential candidates, the archival portion of the study found, used markedly less competence-related language when addressing minority audiences than White ones. Republican candidates, by contrast, showed no such shift. The authors described this as a form of patronising behaviour, an attempt to appear warm and approachable by implicitly calibrating downward to what the speaker assumes its Black audience are equipped to receive.

. . .

It is, in the language of a Republican president addressing the NAACP in the summer of 2000, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” That phrase was coined by George W. Bush’s speechwriter, Michael Gerson, and has since been taken up with characteristic force by the economist Glenn Loury: “Don’t patronise my people. Don’t inflict on us the consequences of a soft bigotry of low expectations. Don’t presume that we’re not capable of objectively expressing excellence in the same way as any other people are expressing excellence.” I cite a Republican president and a Black economist in the same breath here purposefully, because the argument they are both making is not, in any sense, a partisan one. It is a human one.

. . .

It is also, it should be said, not a new one. Zora Neale Hurston, one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, and a woman whose politics defied easy categorisation, opposed the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1955 on precisely these grounds, arguing in a letter to the Orlando Sentinel that court-ordered integration told Black Americans, in effect, that their own schools and communities were something to be fled rather than built and improved. “How much satisfaction can I get,” she wrote, “from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?” While the White liberal reformers celebrated the decision, Hurston, and many others like her, understood exactly what it implied about the assumptions underneath it.

. . .

. . .

Malcolm X understood it, too, and said so rather more forcefully, as was famously his wont. In October 1963, speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, he drew a distinction that I have found, in the sixty-odd years since the words were spoken, to be among the most clarifying formulations in American political thought. Speaking of White conservatives, Malcolm allowed that they were not friends to Black Americans, but argued that they possessed at least one quality the liberal did not: they let you know where you stood. The ‘southern wolf’, he called them, open, undisguised, predictable in their hostility. The northern liberal, by contrast, was something else entirely: the fox. The one who posed as your friend. The one who, in Malcolm’s own words, was “even more cruel and more vicious” than the wolf, because the cruelty was disguised as concern. “These northern foxes pose as White liberals,” he said.

. . .

I cite Malcolm X here advisedly. I am aware that his name, in certain quarters, functions as an alarm, a signal that whatever argument is being made has ventured somewhere uncomfortable. Good. It should be uncomfortable. Because the argument he made in 1963 is, in its essential structure, the argument I am making now, and the fact that a Black Muslim separatist and a Black Catholic conservative have arrived, across sixty years and from entirely different directions, at substantially the same conclusion about White liberal paternalism, ought at minimum to give a thoughtful reader pause. The framework now in place, let us return to the evidence.

. . .

The full story of what was done to Larry Elder in the summer of 2021 begins, as I said, with that Los Angeles Times editorial. Oh, would that it had stayed there. On the eighth of September, five days before the California gubernatorial recall election, Elder, a prominent and outspoken Black conservative lawyer and media figure, was touring homeless encampments in the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles (not as salubrious as it may sound). He moved through the crowd, speaking to the press, conducting himself as candidates do. A White woman on a bicycle, wearing a gorilla mask, rode alongside him before deciding to throw an egg at him. Someone else in the crowd shouted, almost as if on cue, and I am quoting directly: “Get that sellout piece of shit out of here.”

. . .

I would like for you to sit with that, for a spell. A White woman. In a gorilla mask. Hurling an egg at a Black man. In Los Angeles. In 2021. On camera. All whilst another voice shouts racial abuse. If the races concerned were reversed, we would not need to imagine the breathless press coverage nor the outcry. We know what it would have looked like. We know because we have seen it. What we beheld on this occasion, instead, was near total silence: a story that did not fit the narrative, filed quietly, noted briefly, and briskly moved past. No arrest was made. No charges were filed. The very people who have spent years insisting that so-called hate crimes are the worst imaginable ills humans can visit upon each other, and who demand federal investigation and uniform denunciation of the same, somehow found, in this instance, that their attention was required elsewhere.

. . .

I wrote about this at the time, in a private piece circulated among friends and colleagues, at the end of which I identified myself, pointedly, as a progressively-minded, pro-life moderate. I mention that self-description yet again because I want you to see it for what it was: the pretzel, in writing, dated and preserved, still constraining me even as I was in the act of angrily chewing through it. I was angry enough to name what had been done to Larry Elder as racist, yet not quite free enough to name what that made me. That freedom was still many years away.

. . .

. . .

The second case before us is that of Winsome Sears. In November 2021, Sears was elected Lieutenant Governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the first Black woman ever elected to statewide office in the history of the Old Dominion. For a political culture that has expended considerable energy in recent years in the celebration of “firsts” in which the word “historic” is deployed with a frequency that has begun to erode its meaning, this was a first of genuine, substantial, and unambiguous historical significance. A Black woman, an immigrant, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, a self-made businesswoman, elected to high constitutional office by the voters of a state whose history of race relations is among the most freighted in the nation.

. . .

You might have expected, had the celebration of Black women’s achievements been as sincere and intentional as its most vocal proponents claim, at least some acknowledgment of that rather extraordinary first. You would have waited in vain. The silence from the progressive Left was not merely noticeable, it was pointed. Because Winsome Sears, it turns out, was a Republican. Gasp! And a Republican first, under the current political exchange rate, does not really count as a first at all.

. . .

The third case before us requires somewhat more careful handling, because it involves a sequence of events separated by nearly two decades, and because the bitter irony at its core is of the kind that, stated plainly, requires no rhetorical embellishment whatsoever.

. . .

Janice Rogers Brown was an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court, and one of the most intellectually formidable jurists of her generation. In the summer of 2005, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement from the United States Supreme Court. President George W. Bush was bound to nominate her replacement, and Justice Brown was among those seriously considered for the seat, reportedly earning a spot on the short list. She was, it must be noted, a Black woman.

. . .

. . .

And she did not receive the nomination. What she received, instead, was a clear and unambiguous rebuke from Senate Democrats, conveyed most forcefully by one Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, then the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that her nomination would face, in Biden’s own words, delivered on CBS’ Face the Nation in July 2005, a “very, very, very difficult fight.” The objection was not, he claimed, to her race. The objection was to her judicial philosophy, which was unabashedly conservative, and which was, therefore, in the estimation of the Committee’s ambitious senior Democrat, disqualifying. President Bush, yielding to pressure and political calculation, ultimately nominated appeals court judge Samuel Alito, who was duly confirmed. Samuel Alito. A White man.

. . .

Seventeen years later, in September 2020, President Biden, now occupying the White House rather than a Senate committee seat, proudly and unironically declared his intention to nominate the first Black woman to the United States Supreme Court, upon the vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He made of this announcement a considerable occasion, speaking at length of its historic weight, of how long it had been in coming, of what it would mean for the country. He nominated appeals court judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a jurist of genuine distinction, who was, in time, confirmed, thus becoming the first Black woman ever to serve on the U. S. Supreme Court.

. . .

I watched this unfold with a feeling I can only describe as a very particular species of bitterness, the kind that arrives not from anger alone but from the combination of anger and clarity. Why? Because I remembered 2005. I remembered who had been there, and what had been said, what had been done, and what it had meant. The man who stood before the country in 2022 celebrating the historic appointment of a Black woman to the Supreme Court was the very same man who had made it unmistakably clear, seventeen years prior, that a Black woman’s presence on that Court was only welcome if she thought the right thoughts and espoused the right politics. Janice Rogers Brown was indeed a Black woman. Her problem, however, was that she was the wrong kind of Black.

. . .

I have shared this sequence of events with friends, many of whom were unaware of it or had allowed themselves to forget. The usual reaction, with a regularity I have come to expect, is silence. Not the silence of agreement. The silence of those who have encountered an uncomfortable truth they do not know how to address, and who have decided, for the time being, to do nothing with it. I understand that silence. I lived inside a version of it for most of my adult life. But I am no longer willing to pretend it is Swiss neutrality. Silence, in the face of a racial hypocrisy this astonishingly glaring, is itself a position.

. . .

I said at the outset of this movement that that particularly execrable Los Angeles Times opinion piece impelled, in compressed form, everything I have been moved to say here. Let me now say it in expanded form, as plainly as I know how: the so-called progressive Left have, over the course of several decades, constructed an understanding of Black Americans not as a people of infinite variety, complexity, and individuation, but as a constituency, a cause, and, when necessary, a mirror in which White liberal virtue may be admired. Within that construction, a Black man who resists his assigned role is not merely a political opponent. Oh, no. He is far worse. He is a category error, a malformation the system has no framework to accommodate, and to which it must therefore respond with the only tools available to it: delegitimisation, mockery, dismissal, denigration, and the particular cruelty of being told, by people who simultaneously claim to love him, that the way he has chosen to live and think and believe and order his very life is proof that he does not love himself. And that, dear friends, is more painful to me than the sight of a cross burning on the front lawn.

. . .

I am utterly convinced that there is nothing more offensive to a White liberal than the existence of a Black conservative. Not because the White liberal is consciously malicious, though some are. But because the Black conservative violates, simply by existing and declining to perform the expected minstrel contrition, the entire architecture of the White liberal’s self-understanding. The White liberal needs Black suffering to be legible, manageable, and politically addressable, because the White liberal has built an identity around being the one, the only one, who can address it. A Black man who says he does not need that address, who says his politics are his own and his mind is his own and his dignity requires no external validation, is not merely an inconvenience. He is an affront. He is proof that the entire project was never quite as selfless, as virtuous as we were given to believe.

. . .

I know this not only from reading but from living. I know it from the conversations that were not permitted when the wrong people were in the room. I know it from the friends who went quiet when I spoke certain words in their presence. I know it from the names I was called, as a child and as a man, not by people who disliked me but by people who believed they were on my side, and who found my independence of mind, my choices of friend and partner and music and politics and faith and speech, to be a kind of betrayal of an agreement I had never signed.

. . .

The plantation, in this formulation, is not an historical metaphor. It is a current operating condition. And the price of leaving it, as I can well attest from lived experience, is paid in relationships, in rooms one is no longer welcome to enter, in the peculiar loneliness of the person who has been informed, with great warmth and absolute certainty, that the way he has chosen to live is evidence that he does not know his people or love himself.

. . .

I know my people. And I know that we are more than a mere cause, a voting bloc, a hapless child needing to be saved and protected and gently handled.

. . .

Uncle Tom was the hero, by the way. Perhaps next time, Miss Smith, try reading the fucking book.

. . .

. . .

iii. inheritance

. . .

There is a question I have been asked, in various forms and with varying degrees of bemusement, at periodic points throughout my adult life, and it is this: how did I get here? Not merely how did I arrive at this particular worldview, but how did a Black man, born and raised in Southern California, the son and grandson of women whose faith and sacrifices were the whole of his early world, shaped by a community that has, for generations, believed the Republican Party and its ideological allies to be its natural adversary, come to arrive at the convictions set forth in this manifesto of belief? The question is sometimes asked with genuine curiosity. More often, however, it is asked with the implicit assumption that the answer must involve some deficiency, some wound, some failure of racial solidarity that produced, as its melancholy issue, a man who, as we have said before, thinks the wrong thoughts.

. . .

I want to answer that question honestly, and honesty requires me to begin somewhere the reader likely will not expect: not with politics, and not even with philosophy, but with a half-page of small print in a Saturday newspaper.

. . .

I was about fifteen when I was grudgingly granted leave by my poor, exasperated mother to stop attending the church of my boyhood: an historic, large, and politically influential congregation, whose worship I had once loved and had, by then, come to find hollow in some way I could not yet articulate, glossy where I wanted substance, loud where I craved quiet. My mother, after a standoff that lasted rather longer than either of us expected, gave me a choice with no third option: find another church to attend, or return to hers. I do not think she anticipated where that choice would lead either of us. I certainly did not.

. . .

The Los Angeles Times, in those years, still printed a religious directory each Saturday, a dense, partial, alphabetical listing of the city’s churches, synagogues, and temples, and I went looking through it the way a bored and curious teenager goes looking through anything, without much of a plan. Near the very top of the list, under A, sat a single word that snagged something in my memory: Anglican. I had absorbed, from the comically anti-Catholic textbooks of the small Pentecostal parochial school I attended from kindergarten to grade eight, published by a Florida house that could not resist working some polemic against Rome into even a mathematics lesson, a child’s cartoon of what Anglicans were: Catholics, more or less, but reformed, corrected, relieved of the Pope and the statues and the excessive devotion to Mary, Catholicism with the difficult bits conveniently excised. I was, even then, the sort of child who heard a categorical prohibition as an invitation to explore, who went looking for the door it was nailed shut over. I needed to see for myself, to understand, through my own experience, whether the thing I had been told was bad truly was. Yet, if I had suggested that I wished to attend a Catholic Mass and risk being corrupted by the very “whore of Babylon” herself, my dear Methodist mother, I reasoned, would have lowered the proverbial boom. So, to satisfy my curiosity yet prevent the likely reenactment of the Battle of the Boyne in our living room, I compromised and suggested the Anglicans instead.

. . .

. . .

The church where I ultimately landed was St. Mary of the Angels, in the Los Feliz district, and I did not know, timorously creeping in on a Sunday morning in January, with my wary but willing mother close beside me, that I had wandered into a building with a history considerably more storied and complex than the word Anglican could suggest. It had been founded in 1918 by the Reverend Neal Isaac Dodd, a priest of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles who also moonlit as a character actor, ultimately appearing in well over forty Hollywood films, always as a cleric.

. . .

. . .

Father Dodd would come to be known affectionately as “Hollywood’s Padre” owing not only to his film work but also his specific and deliberate ministry to his fellow actors. St Mary of the Angels, almost from its very founding, was known as the actors’ church thanks to the glittering roster of film stars and the like who made the parish their spiritual home. Many of its earliest and most generous patrons were drawn from the film colony’s first golden age. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks famously donated the initial capital required to purchase the land and build the building. “Fatty” Arbuckle and others were members, and MGM provided an orchestra for the church’s inaugural Mass.

. . .

. . .

And then, decades later, the relative Pax Anglicana enjoyed by St Mary’s and many other parishes like it would be dramatically upended when the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States voted along highly divided lines at its General Convention of 1976, without the concurrence of Canterbury or of any other part of the wider global communion from which it claimed descent, to begin ordaining women to the sacramental priesthood, a decision that gravely violated the Church’s hitherto constant and unbroken understanding of Apostolic Succession shared by both Rome and Orthodoxy alike.

. . .

This breach touched upon a foundational tenet of Christian belief that many considered simply beyond any church’s authority to alter. St Mary’s was among them. She became one of only five parishes in the entire Los Angeles diocese to do what had, until that year, been all but unthinkable: secede from the now heterodox Episcopal Church, formally and permanently, choosing instead costly adherence to unbroken Church teaching over the socially and politically driven embrace of what she knew to be heresy. I knew none of this upon walking in that January morning. I knew only that the place, modest as its ornamentation actually was, hit me like weather. Decades of incense worked into the wood. Candlelight. The gentle click of shoes upon well-worn stone. A gallery of organ pipes, hidden, yet soon to announce themselves in startling fashion. Flowing vestments of brocaded silk. It was, without exaggeration, a feast for every sense I possessed, and I was absolutely undone by it before a single word of doctrine had been uttered to me. The day, I remember noting with not a small sense of exhilarated wonder, was Sunday in the Octave of the Epiphany. Whatever that meant.

. . .

I ached to return and to experience that again. After months of patient lobbying, my mother, less thoroughly persuaded, reluctantly agreed, and within a few months I had become, in the particular and total way only a serious teenager can become anything, a fixture of the place, then a student of it, then something closer to its ward. I read everything I could find: general church history, Vernon Staley’s extraordinary primer, sacramental theology, and, because curiosity proved overwhelming, the Catholic sources too: the Catechisms — Trent, Baltimore, and the 1997 edition, the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the encyclicals of popes whose names I was only then learning for the first time, the luminous and revelatory books of Archbishop Fulton Sheen. I remember early on one of the parish curates opening a small leather box at the conclusion of a confirmation class, a small box holding perhaps eight small, round, glass-topped cases, each containing some fragment I did not yet have the theology to interpret, a splinter of the True Cross among them, and feeling, before I understood what I was looking at, a jolt of something close to alarm because, we were shortly told, the contents of that little box called a reliquary were, well, the relics of various saints. Ye gods! These people, I remember thinking, are as bad as the papists I had been warned about. I kept coming back regardless. By the time the catechesis caught up with the instinct, I understood why the communion of saints mattered, why a faith that engaged the whole body – taste, smell, sound, posture, and not merely the intellect – was not superstition but a fuller and more honest account of what a human being actually is. I fell in love with the thing itself, not merely its atmosphere.

. . .

It was there that I was taken in hand by a man who would become, and remain until his death, the truest father I have ever known. Then-Subdeacon Eugene “Beau” Davis was, by the time I met him, on the edge of retirement from a remarkable career as a physician assistant, one of the earliest ever licensed to practice in the state of California. This work had followed previous turns as an Army intelligence officer in Cold War Germany and years as a paramedic in the crude, improvisational infancy of what would come to be known as the emergency medical services, and had led, near its end, to caring for patients at AIDS healthcare charities in those early years of the AIDS pandemic when such work required something of a person’s courage as much as their competence. During his eventual path towards ordination to the diaconate and then ultimately the priesthood, he was the very beating heart of St. Mary’s liturgical life, serving as its Master of Ceremonies and as the trainer of the parish’s altar servers, known as acolytes. It was in this context that our relationship, as stripling to sagacious elder, sapling to weathered oak, mentor to mentee, father to son, truly took root.

. . .

. . .

In teaching me how to serve at the altar, Beau not only taught me simply where to stand and when to kneel and why, but by explaining, patiently and at length, why the Church stood there at all, what each gesture had meant to the men and women who had first made it, centuries before either of us existed. He instilled in me not simply a love of liturgy because of its aesthetic appeal, but, like a piano teacher who teaches one not just the notes to play but the music theory behind them, through the careful and precise study of the liturgy, the Church’s ancient public prayer, he sketched for me an outline of the entire 2,000-year history of what is rightly every Christian’s patrimony and inheritance, even those who purposefully separate themselves from the Church that Christ Himself established. It was through Beau’s eyes and the filter of his considerable lived experience that I entered into and ultimately became lost in the world of Dearmer and Lamburn and Fortescue, of Donne and Neale and Newman, of Herbert and Laud and the Caroline Divines, of the glories of Gregorian chant and the utter horror of Anglican chant done poorly, of Nashdom and Mirfield, of Dom Gregory Dix and Lord Halifax, of Cranmer and Keble, of Tallis and Byrd and Merbecke, of the Cowley Fathers and the Anglican OSB, of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament and the Tantum ergo, of the richness and pomp and splendour of the Solemn High Mass and the preternatural stillness of a Low Mass said with whispered reverence. This, all of this, was my treasure. It gave form and shape and meaning and depth to what, until then, had been a largely impoverished experience of faith and worship, having been cut off from the rich and nourishing taproot first watered by those drops of Divine sweat and blood that flowed from Golgotha to the Upper Room, to Ephesus and Galatia and Corinth, to Athens and Rome and Trent, to Canterbury and Los Feliz… How could I not – how could anyone so immersed in something so rich and beautiful and intricately woven – give myself over so utterly and have my world and my view of it so irretrievably altered? Lex orandi, lex credendi, indeed.

. . .

. . .

I want to tell you something about Father Davis that complicates any tidy story you might be inclined to construct from what follows, because he would have insisted on the complication himself, with considerable relish. He was, in his theology, entirely, unshakably orthodox, unbending on matters he considered non-negotiable, and rigorously, scientifically pro-life, a position he reached not merely through Scripture but through the plain physiological fact, known to him as a clinician as it was known to him as a believer, that what grows in a womb is not a philosophical abstraction, but a human life in progress. Yet he was, in his secular politics, about as far to the left as a man could comfortably stand, a fact he proclaimed himself, via a phrase I have never fully understood and have never stopped enjoying, by declaring himself “to the left of Attila the Hun”. He has been gone now some sixteen years, so I hope he will not mind me saying this now, although it was scarcely something he made any effort to hide when alive: Beau loathed Republicans, on principle – absolutely loathed them – and considered President George W. Bush an affliction of especial difficulty. He would have found a great deal of what follows in this essay, I suspect, either exasperating or hilarious, quite possibly both at once, and quite possibly in the same breath, and yet, he may well have found himself making the same latter-day confession as I have been laying out here. He also smoked like a chimney, drank weak Scotch with a connoisseur’s devotion, and could recite, from memory and with gusto, entire scenes and lines of dialogue from nearly every musical and classic film ever made and would often do so without warning. He remains, of every person I have ever known, the single best argument I possess that serious faith and serious engagement with the secular world can occupy the same capacious man without either apologising to the other. I present him here not as a loophole in my own argument but as a corrective to anyone tempted to see in this essay the suggestion that genuine belief points in only one political direction or philosophical worldview. It does not. It never has. I simply, in time, came to see the two threads of my own life, the theological and the political, pulling in a single direction, where his, for reasons that were entirely his own and that I fully respect, never quite did.

. . .

Early in my formation as an Anglican, I carried with me a set of specific and stubborn objections to the Church of Rome: her teaching on contraception, the authority claimed by the papacy, the honour paid to Mary. I did not resolve these objections through argument imposed upon me. Without actually intending to, I resolved them, one by one and over years, the only way I have ever resolved anything of genuine importance: by reading the thing itself, in its own language, rather than in the language and with the words of its critics, by taking the Catholic Church’s own catechesis seriously enough to let it answer the question on its own terms before I deemed the question unanswerable. And, to my own considerable surprise and mounting discomfiture, the objections simply stopped being objections. I found, one day, examining myself with the same honesty I have tried to bring to this entire work, that I no longer disagreed with anything the Catholic Church actually taught and believed.

. . .

While conversion would have been the logical and expected thing to follow, I did not convert immediately. St. Mary’s had become, by then, not merely my church but my home, and conversion meant risking friendships, affection, and love I simply could not fathom losing. I allowed that fear to cement my feet in place far longer than I am proud to admit. What finally moved me to wade into the Tiber and commence my lonely swim to the far shore was not an argument but a farewell that preceded a death, which in turn occasioned an election. In April 2005, I watched, along with the rest of the world, as Pope John Paul II sharply declined in health before finally passing away. I beheld these extraordinary scenes with a grief that surprised me in its depth, and, weeks later, newly unemployed and glued to my television, I watched as the ancient College of Cardinals elected Joseph Ratzinger, a man whose teaching and fearless orthodoxy I had for years admired, to assume the Chair of St. Peter. I let out a shout, I am told, of the sort usually reserved for a stadium. Beau, hospitalised that same week for an unrelated matter, was sporting an identical grin when I popped round to his hospital room later that day, and could speak of nothing else. Sitting with him, sharing an unguarded joy neither of us needed to explain to the other, I understood that I had run out of honest reasons to remain outside a church whose entire corpus of teaching and belief I had already, quietly, come to accept. To continue as I was would have been, at best, pretence, at worst, an affront to the very God whose patient shepherding and generous provision of grace led me to, at long last, know the fullness of faith first given to the Twelve and so valiantly and improbably safeguarded by the Church His Son Himself had built.

. . .

. . .

I was received into the Catholic Church on the sixth of June, 2005, the Feast of St. Norbert. I made a solemn profession of faith. I signed my name to the Athanasian Creed. I was enrolled in the Brown Scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, blessed, and welcomed home. Present that day, in that simple, yet lovely Claretian chapel, were Mrs. Lemelle, the greatest teacher I have ever known, whose quiet, yet sincere practice of her Catholic faith planted seeds I was largely unaware of until they began sprouting; Father Touchstone, an Episcopal priest of a bygone era, whose friendship and mentorship I would enjoy until the end of his life; Bill, an extraordinary autodidact and an elder fellow acolyte from St. Mary’s, who, as a secretly practising Catholic, became for many a kind of Harriet Tubman, guiding many friends into the Catholic Church, discreetly, with neither gloating nor fanfare; Charles, who to this day remains a most cherished friend, whose charisma and charm I fell victim to when first we met years before, whose Chestertonian conviviality, whose erudition and scholarship in service of the Church made a considerable impression upon me, and who would later serve as my confirmation sponsor. And, of course, there was Mom, by now no longer wary, seeing the fruit that this different spiritual tree was producing in the life of her only son.

. . .

I tell you all of this not as a religious memoir wedged inside a political accounting, but because I do not think the rest of this story, this slow-rolling evolution, can be fully understood without it. Long before I ever encountered a page of Burke or de Maistre, I had already known, in the marrow of my very soul, the thing their philosophy would later give me language for: that Truth is something one receives, through inheritance and formation and the patient accumulation of a tribe’s hard-won wisdom, rather than something one invents from first principles in a single afternoon. I did not choose St. Mary’s or High Church Anglo-Catholicism because I had first worked out a theory of tradition and gone looking for an institution to embody it. I fell into a particular, unrepeatable place, shaped by a particular history of quiet resistance in the service of sacred tradition, and it formed in me, before I had any politics to speak of, a sense of what is owed to the past and what the past, rightly understood, still has to teach the present. Everything that here follows is an attempt to give that instinct its proper name.

. . .

continue to movement iv

. . .

a brief note on publication

Sinfonia Apologia – a heartfelt exploration of identity, heritage, faith, and unexpected journeys – is my debut work for this newly inaugurated Substack. More than that, I sincerely hope it is the beginning of a genuine and lasting engagement between us.

As a whole, this essay runs to some twenty-three thousand words. Rather than ask that of you in a single sitting, I am publishing it as a serial: two movements at a time, over several days, beginning now and concluding next week on Wednesday, the nineteenth of August. I have chosen to do this in the interest of respecting your time rather than presuming upon it, and because a great deal of what follows asks to be sat with and reflected upon before the next idea lands upon the shore.

Please, read each portion as it comes, and allow it settle. If something here moves you enough to share it, please send those with whom you share it to the beginning rather than wherever you happen to have left off. Like a symphony, this really only makes sense upon hearing the first notes.

Welcome, friend. It’s good to have you here.

-Anthony McAlister

. . .

movements

prologue
i. the pretzel
ii. on the plantation
iii. inheritance
iv. kinship
v. on sovereignty
vi. roots
vii. the argument
viii. reckoning
epilogue

. . .

prologue

. . .

I begin this, as I seem to begin most things of importance, at an hour when more sensible men have long since surrendered to sleep and the world has, at last, quieted itself enough that I may hear my own thoughts rather than what the day has spent itself insisting upon. There is a particular kind of clarity that visits round midnight and beyond, a kind of low tide of the mind at which the sundry wreckage one has spent years carefully, quietly observing from afar finally shows itself along the shore. In the wake of such low tides, I have oft been compelled, grudgingly and at no small cost, to stop pretending I do not see it. My mother used to say I was born facing the wrong direction, wakeful when the world slept and only half present when it expected me upright and useful. I think now she meant this less as complaint than as wistful observation. She is gone now, my sweet mom. The woman who made her, who in the truest sense made me as well, followed her within mere months. Between them both, I lost not only the two paramount members of my clan but the entire weather system under which I had spent the whole of my life sheltering.

. . .

Do not misapprehend me, dear friend. I do not set down this unwieldy weight in order to solicit your sympathy, though I will not pretend I would refuse it. I set it down, here and now, because grief – the genuine, disorienting, disfiguring kind, the kind that removes the floor rather than merely darkening the room – brings with it one peculiar blessing I never sought and would not now surrender: it burns away, with a thoroughness no ardent act of will could ever manage, every politeness, every careful accommodation, every tiny treason a man commits against his own self in the interest of being easier to love. What remains, then, once the smoke has cleared and the visitors have long stopped calling and the silence in the house has become simply the house, is something closer to the truth than I had been willing and able, in forty years of punctilious stage management, to permit myself. I did not go looking for that truth. It arrived, as the deepest things generally do, unbidden, through a low door I had not thought to lock, and I have spent the better part of the few years since groping about for language equal to what walked through it.

. . .

I have long admired St John Henry Cardinal Newman, having first encountered him in the halcyon idyl of my Anglican youth, not yet realising I would one day traverse a similar road down which Newman once ventured. I heard, some years ago, a talk given upon the occasion of his canonisation titled simply “Newman the Failure”. Herein was explored, with real and genuine tenderness, how a man who gave his entire life to the Church and to the patient labour of scholarship remained, until the end of it, riddled with doubt, with a persistent sense of his own inadequacy, and with a number of genuine failures, ventures that did not succeed, ambitions that did not resolve as he had hoped. I did not fully understand, when I first heard that lecture, why it moved me as deeply as it did. I understand now. I do not offer you, in the sea of words and memories that follow, the testament of a man who has arrived anywhere. I offer you the honest accounting of a man in the middle of his own unfinished argument with himself, who has decided, at long last, that the argument is worth conducting in full view rather than in the carefully curated privacy he had maintained for most of his life. Newman famously called his own such accounting an apologia, a defence, though I think anyone who has actually read him understands the word hugely undersells what he was really doing. He was not building a case for a jury. He was guiding us through every book, every conversation, every interior grapple, every private crisis that had moved him, by increments entirely too small to notice at the time, from where he began to where he needed to be, trusting that the walk itself would explain more than any verdict could. I did not purposefully set out, when I began writing this, to follow Newman’s example. I find, however, arriving now near its end, that I have unwittingly followed it anyway, which I take to be less a mark of my own originality than of how honestly any life examined closely enough tends to organise itself.

. . .

. . .

What follows, then, is not a case I am submitting for your approval. What follows is my attempt at that very language I have spent so long searching for in vain. It concerns the God who knew me before I was formed. It concerns Blood, and the particular inheritance of having been born to a people I know I love without qualification yet have, on more than one occasion, been told I do not love enough. It concerns the slow and largely undramatic process by which a man’s convictions, having been kept under careful wraps primarily for the comfort of those in rooms in which he wished to remain welcome, at last outgrew the wrapping. It is a stocktaking, the kind a man permits himself only when enough has happened, and enough has been lost, that polite pretence no longer feels survivable.

. . .

I have tried to present all of this as one continuous act rather than as argument followed by confession, because I no longer believe the two can be honestly separated, and because the people for whom I write this, whoever you turn out to be, have earned better of me than a case prosecuted from atop a podium. You have earned the truth, offered deliberately, the way one offers anything that has taken a lifetime to curate and interpret and that one is, even now, more than a little worried to say aloud.

. . .

I shall endeavour, as honestly as reticence may allow, to guide you through all the places and people and moments and years that have produced the marvellously complex soul now standing before you. I have often wondered what single thing accounts for all that, the morass of me. I have come to suspect there isn’t one. There is simply the residual accumulation: a parish discovered by accident, a mentor who taught me the utter joy of not taking the world quite so seriously, philosophers dead two centuries and contemporaries very much alive, a kinsman’s quiet courage, a country that moved whilst I was busy standing still, and two extraordinary women, now gone, but, even now, still listening, watching, waiting, praying.

. . .

Into my room these women come and go, chatting about Michelangelo…

. . .

Alright. Deep breath. Let us begin.

. . .

i. the pretzel

. . .

We begin, then, as the two of them would have wanted me to begin: honestly, and without the performative throat-clearing I have spent so long substituting for honesty. For most of my adult years, when asked where I stood politically, I gave an answer I had built the way a man builds a bridge over water he does not trust himself to cross, that is to say carefully, with redundancies, engineered to bear weight from more than one direction at once. I am, I would say, a left-leaning, pro-life moderate. This rather awkward appellation had the virtue of being technically true yet the far greater virtue of being almost impossible to pin down. It committed me to nothing a room full of people with conflicting politics could object to all at once. It let me keep my seat at every table, which is precisely what I wanted, and precisely what, I have now come to believe, no honest man ever should spend time wanting.

. . .

I will tell you what that phrase was actually doing because I think the diplomatic passport I carried for the better part of three decades is a more honest starting point than any of the views I now hold outright. A label, I have come to learn, is rarely a description. More often it is a wardrobe choice, assembled for the room one expects to enter, and I had, by the time I was old enough to vote, become rather adept at dressing for the room.

. . .

This is not, I want to be clear, a conversion story of the secular kind. I have come to distrust conversion stories of that sort, my own especially, because they tend to flatter the convert. They suggest a man who once believed one thing and now, having beheld some sudden light, believes another. They invite the reader to admire the seeing rather than to ask what, precisely, kept him from looking in the first place. What follows here is not that. The convictions to which this essay seeks to give context were not handed to me whilst en route to Damascus. They were, most of them, already present in me decades ago, inconveniently, the way a draught sits within a house no one has gotten round to insulating. What changed was not the belief. What changed was my willingness to stop pretending the draught wasn’t there, to stop telling guests it was merely the weather.

. . .

I can, in fact, date the draught’s first real gust with some precision, and I shall share the date because I think it matters. I was 15 years of age, a high school junior, and had been made editor-in-chief of my school’s student-led newspaper, a role generally reserved for seniors, in the autumn of 1997. Affirmative action was very much in the public conversation and consciousness that year owing, in part, to the enactment of California’s much-debated Proposition 209 as well as the U.S. Supreme Court’s earlier refusal to take up Hopwood v. Texas, in which the Fifth Circuit had previously determined the University of Texas School of Law’s use of race in admissions decisions to be unconstitutional.

. . .

In response, and with the blessing of our faculty advisor, I authored an editorial arguing, plainly and without hedging, that so-called affirmative action as policy was fundamentally insulting to Black people, that the implication underneath – that we required a lowered bar, a widened doorframe, a shortened fence, in order to compete – was itself a pernicious form of contempt masquerading as compassion. I do not think that I had read a single conservative text or analysis when I wrote it. I didn’t need to. I simply had to look at my own life, at the mother and grandmother who had made education and the pursuit of excellence the sole non-negotiables in a family that did not have very many other luxuries to spare, at cousins raised with the same unbending expectation, all of us told, repeatedly, that we represented not only ourselves but our entire family’s name and honour. And I just could not square that inheritance with a policy that asserted that people who looked like me required the rules be softened and the standards lowered in order to survive contact with people who did not. Whether that instinct can be proven statistically remains a genuine and unresolved dispute among economists and legal scholars; Richard Sander’s so-called “mismatch” research, which purports to show that beneficiaries of race-based admissions preferences are set up to struggle rather than to thrive at institutions for which their preparation did not yet suit them, has been challenged, revised, and re-litigated in the academic literature for nigh on two decades now, and I will not pretend the matter is settled, because it is not. But the argument itself is not fringe thinking. It is a real and serious open question, not a crank’s theory, and I did not need a peer-reviewed analysis in order to feel the awful weight of it at fifteen.

. . .

The recoil in response to my editorial was immediate and it was ferocious and it came from precisely the direction I had not expected. Members of the Black Student Union, a club whose weekly lunch period meetings I had attended, however infrequently, denounced the piece and, by extension, me, with a swiftness that startled my teenaged self considerably more than any disagreement from outside our community ever could have. For them, my traitorous rejection of this fundamental tenet of Blackness was little more than confirmation of Zora Neale’s belief that “all skinfolk ain’t kinfolk”. I would like to pause here for just the briefest moment because I believe this marks the single earliest data point, if you will, for everything this essay goes on to argue and explore. You see, I had not yet formed the pretzel described above. I did not yet know I would need one. What I learned, in that first and rather brutal instance, is that saying the true thing plainly, the first time, cost me something immediate and something communal, something very much tied to my sense of self and identity, and that the cost was not abstract. It was the sudden, cold withdrawal of people who had, until the previous week, been my friends, my kin. The pretzel I would spend the ensuing two decades quietly forming and living within was not built from confusion about what I believed or any loathing of who I was. It was built, quite methodically, as insulation against a version of that particular winter recurring.

. . .

I will be honest about how long this went on, as the honesty is rather the point. I registered to vote as a Democrat the way most of us inherit our first politics or receive our first cars, not through investigation but through bestowal; it was the family weather, the assumption already standing in the room, and I no more thought to interrogate it than I thought to interrogate the assumption that we attended church on Sundays or that education came before nearly everything else, regardless of what else we had or lacked. My first vote, cast in a presidential primary not long after I came of age, went to Bill Bradley, the more progressive of the two men seeking the Democratic nomination that year. I voted for him because the things he said sounded, to a young man’s ear, like decency, and decency, at that age, was nearly the whole of my political philosophy. Shortly afterward, for reasons I could not have fully articulated then and can only partially articulate now, I re-registered as unaffiliated. I told myself this reflected independence of mind. In truth, I think it reflected the first faint hint of the draught, a visceral discomfort for which I had not yet the vocabulary, or the wisdom, to name.

. . .

I stayed there, technically undeclared and independent, for the better part of two and a half decades, while underneath the technicality something else entirely was taking shape. I held convictions, in those years, on the unborn, on the family, on the relationship between faith and public life, on the difference between equality of dignity and equality of outcome, that, if we are honest, were never truly of the left, however carefully I dressed them up for company. I simply did not say so. Not plainly. Not for years. Not after that adolescent editorial taught me what plain speech, however keenly felt, could cost in reality. I told myself I was a committed moderate. I was simply undecided. Yet, I was not undecided. I was undeclared, and the difference betwixt those two states of mind is a gulf of considerable size.

. . .

Here, then, is the actual chronology, stated as plainly as I am now able to state anything. I registered as a Democrat at seventeen, mere months before the 2000 primary, California law permitting registration at that age when the next election fell within a particular window of one’s eighteenth birthday. I cast my first vote for Bill Bradley, the “liberal lion.” I re-registered independent not long after and remained so for nearly thirty years, a period in which I voted for Barack Obama twice, the second time with no less enthusiasm than the first; for Hillary Clinton, with rather less enthusiasm, but still for her nonetheless; and for Joe Biden in 2020. And then, the levees finally broke, and suddenly, I needed new, dry land upon which to exist. So, I voted for Donald Trump in 2024, not as a protest, not out of anger, not as the “lesser of two evils” but as a choice, a happy choice, having watched across the years between conservative conviction and the people who held it treated in public discourse not merely as mistaken but as something more akin to subhuman, a development I could no longer in conscience pretend I had not noticed. Early in 2026, having spent most of my adult life as a man who declared no party at all, I became, for the first time, a registered Republican. (You see, dear Jonathan, I can keep my promises.)

. . .

I do not offer that chronology as a tidy arc, because a tidy arc it most definitely is not, and I have come to appreciate the untidiness is the most honest thing about it. This is not the record of a man steadily migrating from one shore to the next. This is the honest record of a man whose convictions held remarkably steady while the ground beneath him, the party he had inherited, the rooms in which he had once felt safe, moved, decisively and at speed, in a direction he found he could no longer follow. I did not leave the Left so much as discover, slowly and then all at once, that it had already left certain values and convictions I was never willing or able to surrender.

. . .

What you are reading, therefore, dear friend, is no confession of error. It is something nearer an anagnorisis, a recognition, long deferred, of what was always the case. I am forty-four years old. I am done, at last, with the pretzel. What follows here is the rest of me: newly untwisted, unpasteurised, offered without apology and, one hopes, without disdain for those who will read it and disagree, because disagreement, honestly met, has never once deterred me. Only the silence did. I have given that silence enough of my life. Too much. It is now someone else’s turn to listen.

. . .

continue to movements ii & iii

. . .

“You only like the beginnings of things,” an exasperated Dr Faye Miller once said of Don Draper. Mercifully, I am not Don Draper. Well, okay, not entirely… But I do rather like the beginnings of things. A lot. In every new beginning, there is the slightest hint of spring. Hope abounds. Heart and head function as one. The destination may well be unclear – perhaps even irrelevant – yet the mere prospect of the journey absolutely titillates.

Alas, here we are. The commencement of something new, exciting. New for me, that is. And I am genuinely delighted you’ve elected to come along.

I haven’t a clue as to where we shall ultimately land. I don’t particularly care. But I do fully intend to enjoy the journey, and I sincerely hope you will find in me a companionable guide, however occasionally querulous (though, one hopes, never noisome or contemptible).

Here in this space, we shall reminisce, opine, examine, celebrate, laugh, mourn. There are no rules here, save one – be thoughtful. In the fullest sense of that word. I promise to you candour and honesty and purposeful precision. I ask of you patience and trust and intellectual curiosity.

I will follow no set schedule. I intend to share, for the most part, long-form thoughts and expositions, but I will never waste your time. I will not hold punches wherever philosophical fisticuffs is warranted. I will not thin the soup whenever full fat would better serve our meal. This is a laboratory, a salon, an arena. But it is no echo chamber. Push back, but do so from principle, never emotion.

That said, off we trot.

But first, an entreaty – an anointing, of sorts. As with coins hid under the mast afore sailors would set to sea… As with Herr van Beethoven’s musical christening of the Josefstadt, I offer these borrowed, fragmentary words from Emerson’s “Concord Hymn” –

…On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Welcome, friend. It’s good to have you here.