By Noah
Rothman
Thursday,
June 01, 2023
New York
Times reporters Jonathan Weisman and Trip Gabriel began with a challenge: how to
make the square peg of the most diverse field of Republican presidential
aspirants in memory fit into the round hole of Republican voters’ presumed
racism. Whereas other journalists might have shirked this awesome responsibility
and just described the observable contours of their environments, these
intrepid reporters sheltered their readers from any preconception-shattering
revelations by applying a novel framework: Republicans’ racism is apparent in
their support for candidates who refuse to buckle under the weight of American
racism.
Sure,
Senator Tim Scott talks about the country’s “bitter, racist past” and his
family’s own experience with discrimination. Sure, former U.N. ambassador Nikki
Haley describes the “isolation” she felt as a dark-skinned girl growing up in
“small-town South Carolina.” Sure, talk-show host Larry Elder acknowledges the
existence of the “systemic racism” to which his family was subjected. Sure,
Vivek Ramaswamy, too, “often” confides in his audiences about the “isolation”
he experienced “as the son of Indian immigrants” growing up outside Cincinnati.
But in describing these phenomena as obstacles to be overcome rather than
insurmountable barriers to the success of individuals of minority extraction,
these candidates have demonstrated that they really don’t understand bigotry
in America.
In bolstering their own bootstrap biographies with stories of
discrimination, they have put forth views about race that at times appear at
odds with their view of the country — often denying the existence of a system
of racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.
This,
the authors contend, is a strategic calculation — and because it is strategic,
it is dishonest. Or, if you prefer to be charitable, it is at least ignorant of
what “many scholars say” about the legacy of structural racism that “left
people of color still struggling.” The insidious implication in this line of
argumentation is that the nonwhite candidates in the race for the Republican
presidential nomination are, at best, inauthentic. At worst, they are
contemptuous of those with similar ethnic and racial distinctions because they
reject the undeniable existence of insuperable racism in American life.
All this
is a ploy, these reporters suggest — a sop to the racial hatreds that lurk not
far beneath the surface of the average Republican voter. And to the likes of
perceptive New York Times scribes, it’s not even particularly
coded.
Republican candidates of color don’t see their pasts in their present,
even if the two front-runners in the race for the Republican nomination, Donald
J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, are elevating racial grievance to the center of
conservative politics, through overt or covert appeals to white anger.
We’re
left with a narrative sure to satisfy the audience to which the Times has
become hostage: The Republican front-runners are doling out conventional white
racial hostility; their opponents, while superficially nonwhite, are
broadcasting a nuanced message on race to which they couldn’t possibly
subscribe if they were being honest with themselves and their audiences;
Republican primary voters are either too stupid or too bigoted to know the
difference.
If that
doesn’t work for you, it does work for the usual suspects marshaled into
providing supporting quotes to buttress this prefabricated thesis.
Former
South Carolina lawmaker and current cable-news panelist Bakari Sellers found it
“troubling” that Haley and Scott — both of whom acknowledge American racism as
an obstacle they’ve overcome — can’t make the “logical jump” to the conclusion
that “systemic racism” is functionally insurmountable (irrespective of their
life experiences indicating otherwise).
According
to former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens, who has fitted himself with a
hairshirt in penance for
his professional sins and
self-flagellates on command, the presumed dishonesty of the Right’s minority
candidates is only an effort to “make an overwhelmingly white Republican
audience feel better about themselves.” Indeed, what these candidates offer
Republican voters is ony indemnification from the charge of racism. The
candidates themselves are immaterial.
Indeed,
according to Emory University political scientist Andra Gillespie, the very
premise of the article is flawed insofar as it presents evidence that
candidates such as Haley, Scott, and Elder are, in fact, addressing the
existence of racism head-on. Rather, the “problem” with these and other
candidates is that they are “declaring there’s no racism.” Here the fault lies
with the Times editors, who, we must assume, skimmed the copy
that proves Gillespie’s contention false.
Ultimately,
all this “downplaying of systemic racism” serves to advance a nefarious
Republican cause: attacking “wokeness,” arresting “the influence of ‘critical
race theory,’” and scuttling “diversity” in all its forms. All its forms save,
you know, the Republican presidential nominating contest.
Torturing
these candidates’ description of their own sense of agency and mastery over
their challenging environments into a narrative that reduces them to tools in
the hands of ill-defined but surely bigoted social forces is a transparent
exercise in political branding. It’s also pretty gross. Still, the candidates
in the Times’ crosshairs should wear this calumny as a badge of
honor. Their national prominence disproves a central progressive conceit:
American minorities cannot advance in American society if their hands are not
being held by condescending left-wing ideologues bankrolled by the
redistributionist fiscal schemes that society’s enlightened social engineers
envision.
You are
meant to subscribe to the proposition that true anti-racism sees minorities as
interchangeable, monolithic, nondescript victims. We’re fortunate that some
prominent Americans in public life see the prefix “anti” in this proposition as
an utterly superfluous addition to a familiar description of a very old
American sin.
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