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Atlantic records emerge7/14/2023 You create this artificial legitimacy around an illegitimate point.” You pick someone to affirm the lie in a way that you ostensibly take your fingerprints off it. Republicans, Steele told me, like finding “the Black man to put out there to say that shit to begin with. Likewise, Michael Steele, the Black former chairman of the Republican National Committee, told me he believes that Scott is expressing such an absolutist rejection of racism-despite Scott’s acknowledgment that he has faced racial profiling in his own life-because he recognizes that that assertion is what the GOP’s mainly white electorate wants to hear. Such comments from figures like Scott and Haley, he told me, provide “permission” for other Republicans “to not even have to ask the questions” about whether systemic discrimination still shapes U.S. Jones, the founder and president of the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that studies American attitudes toward race and culture. But in responding to Obama, they have demonstrated how difficult it has become for any GOP leader-especially one who is not white-to challenge the party consensus that the nation has transcended discrimination against minorities and women.įor a Republican coalition that still relies predominantly on white voters, hearing nonwhite GOP candidates dismiss racism offers “acquittal and absolution,” says Robert P. Scott and Haley have leaned into the criticism from Obama, highlighting it to raise their profile in a Republican presidential race where each has attracted just single-digit support in national polls. “When I hear people telling me that America is a racist nation, I got to say: Not my America, not our America,” Scott declared to loud applause. Read: ‘People who are different are not the problem in America’ That drew a sharp rebuke earlier this month from Obama, who said the pair had joined “a long history of African American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can all make it.’”īoth Scott and Haley responded by accusing Obama of treating minority voters as victims and repeating their claims that racism and structural inequities can no longer hold back anyone who will “work hard” and display “integrity” and “grit,” as Scott told a mostly white audience at a Fox News town hall with Sean Hannity last Tuesday. In their presidential campaigns, Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is Black, and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, have repeatedly insisted that systemic or structural racism is no longer a problem in America. The sharp exchange between former President Barack Obama and two nonwhite 2024 GOP presidential candidates captures how diverging perceptions about racial inequity have emerged as a central fault line between the Republican and Democratic coalitions.
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