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Republican candidates of color pretend the party doesn't embrace racism [1]

['Daily Kos Staff']

Date: 2023-08-08  

We're now at the stage of the presidential election cycle where the media gently attempts to probe the question of why nonwhite Republican politicians support Republicanism despite, you know, the party being a toxic sludge of racism and white supremacy with "tax cuts for rich people" tossed in there to give rich people a reason to keep shoveling money into Republican coffers.

The Washington Post's version is titled, “How GOP’s candidates of color navigate a party that downplays racism”:

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, an Indian American and the first woman of color to lead her state, warns primary voters that focusing on racial division amounts to nothing more than “woke self-loathing.”

In ye olden days Republicans railed against the division created by "hyphenated Americans," meaning any American that acknowledged any heritage whatsoever other than Quarter Pounder. Now it's variations of "woke" that range from Haley's little quips to whatever Vivek Ramaswamy thinks he's doing.

Biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who is also Indian American, decries the corrosive “cult of racial woke-ism,” which he says turns those who dissent from an accepted racial orthodoxy into “pariahs in your own community.”

Yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell any of that means, other than another conservative Republican being pissed off that his "community" thinks he is an unmitigated tool willing to screw his "community" to hell and back in his own attempts at self-promotion. Again, though, not a new phenomenon.

We're going to cut to the chase, however, because the answer to how these Republican presidential hopefuls "navigate" their party's rampant racism and white supremacy is also the same as it has been in every other election cycle: If you can't ignore it, deny it; if you can't deny it, blame nonwhites for talking about it too much.

But as they address almost entirely White audiences in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, they also echo a complaint made mostly by White conservatives — that the country has focused too heavily on systemic racism. It’s a view that puts them sharply at odds with many other Americans, including most people of color, and showcases the challenge of being a minority candidate seeking to lead a party that downplays the pervasiveness of racial discrimination.

Yeah, there you go, sport. The highly complex strategy "Republican candidates of color" use to get ahead in the party is to deny systemic racism exists or, at the least, condemn anyone who thinks we ought to do anything about it as “divisive.”

And I am so, so tired because this feint is literally the same one used by every single nonwhite Republican seeking a national audience, and has been since the Southern Strategy elevated white grievance into the glue holding the Republican Party together. It is not a strategic choice on their part: It is a requirement. It does not matter what your skin color is, what your name is, or where your close or distant ancestors hail from. You will not get Republican votes unless you announce that systemic racism is nothing that anyone in government has to do anything about.

And every year, in every election, the results are cartoonish.

But while highlighting her own efforts to hurdle racial and gender bias, Haley argues that her success proves they are not major barriers in today’s America. “Take it from me, the first minority female governor in history: America is not a racist country,” she says in her stump speech.

C'mon now. That's a comedy skit, not a political premise. "Take it from me, literally the first nonwhite woman to ever be elected to this position in all of American history: Racism is no longer a problem."

In a recent ad, [Sen. Tim Scott] charged that “the radical left is indoctrinating our children, teaching CRT instead of ABC,” a reference to critical race theory, which contends that bias is inherent in many parts of society.

That’s a line of hard-right fascist bullshit indistinguishable from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ version. Nobody is teaching CRT to our children (and who, outside of Fox News viewers, knows what “CRT” is, anyway?), and only a scattered handful of university classrooms teach CRT to anyone at all. Scott is promoting a flat-out hoax for the sake of peddling his party's insistence that it is racism's opponents who have gone too far, and he does it willingly because if he says any sentence other than that one he'll never win another election as a Republican in his life.

Scott and the other Republican presidential contenders continue, however, to get a boost from media representations of the racist nature of Republican acts. In Florida, DeSantis continues to push the racist premise that slavery at least taught slaves useful "skills." That DeSantis and allies plucked this sentiment out of white supremacist circles goes largely ignored. When the DeSantis campaign produced and sent out a video prominently featuring a full-on Nazi symbol, it was treated by the media as a gaffe rather than a signal.

The latest brouhaha among the Republican right is the discovery that yet another dapper up-and-coming conservative pundit used a pseudonym to post years of racist drivel on overtly white nationalist sites, which is something that happens with clockwork regularity among the far-right pundits boosted by Republicans like Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance, but political reporters continue to very aggressively pretend has no wider implications. One of the promotional blurbs on the now-outed white supremacist's soon-to-be-released new book, a supposed examination of the "origins of woke," comes from Vivek Ramaswamy himself.

That does not sound like Ramaswamy is "navigating" conservatives’ hard-right racist streak at all. It sounds like Ramaswamy is just doing his best to aim it at people who aren't him.

Quite simply, you cannot run as a Republican if you acknowledge systemic racism to be real, and so the only Republicans you are going to see on the campaign trail are ones who insist systemic racism isn't real. This is a country of 300 million people; you don't have to look all that hard to find a rich and successful person who insists that because they overcame systemic racism, it must no longer exist.

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