Republicans of color

 

No one needs to tell Tim Scott, U.S. senator from South Carolina, how tough it is to be a Black Republican in the age of Donald Trump and the former president’s racist rhetoric.

“For those of you on the left,” Scott said in a February 2023 speech in Iowa, “You can call me a prop, you can call me a token, you can call me the n-word. You can question my blackness. You can even call me ‘Uncle Tim.’ Just understand, your words are no match for my evidence. … The truth of my life disproves your lies.”

Scott is not the only person of color waving their GOP credentials as if it were still the Party of Lincoln.

Scholars Joseph Lowndes and Daniel HoSang explore the slow but steady growth of racial diversity within the GOP’s grassroots base, elected officials and opinion leaders. In the 2022 midterms elections, for instance, seven Black or Latino Republican candidates won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“What’s more,” they write, “none downplayed the issue of race, but rather are using their biographies and experiences of racial discrimination to legitimize their conservative bona fides.”