What’s Driving Black Candidates to the Republican Party?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 22 August 2022
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
The Republican Party is clearly no place for Black activism as most of us know it. Members of the Party inveigh against what they call critical race theory, and oppose efforts to redress racial discrimination in everything from school admissions to policing and public safety; in some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is considered unpatriotic. And yet the Republican Party has recently attracted an almost unprecedented number of Black candidates to its fold—more than at any time since the Reconstruction era. “In a moment where the Party . . . has really wholeheartedly embraced white-grievance politics,” Leah Wright Rigueur tells David Remnick, “they are endorsing more Black candidates than they have in the past twenty-five years.” Wright Rigueur is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “The Loneliness of the Black Republican,” which covers the period from the New Deal through the Reagan Administration. The G.O.P., she argues, is exploiting a moment when the long-standing relationship between Black Americans and the Democratic Party is weakening, and it aims to capitalize on an “everyday conservatism” among voters. “It actually makes sense that in the aftermath of Barack Obama—with Black people’s levels of support and warmth for the Democratic Party in decline and the belief among a small sect of African Americans that [it] is just as racist as the Republican Party—that actually frees some people up to actually vote Republican.”
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| 0:48.7 | This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:57.2 | The Republican Party has made it very clear that it has no place for black activism. |
| 1:03.0 | At every level, leaders of the party demonize the Black Lives Matter movement |
| 1:07.7 | and what they characterize as the teaching of critical race theory in the schools. |
| 1:13.0 | The GOP opposes affirmative action and almost any effort to redress discrimination in the present. |
| 1:19.9 | In some quarters, simply acknowledging that racism exists is considered unpatriotic. |
| 1:27.9 | And yet recently, the Republican Party has also attracted increasing numbers of black candidates to its fold. |
| 1:34.0 | The website 538 recently published a report that was headlined, |
| 1:38.7 | a record number of black Republicans could be headed to Congress, |
| 1:42.7 | and it cited some 80 or more candidates. That's a very |
| 1:46.1 | stark contrast to the current statistics, two black representatives, and one single senator in the |
| 1:52.6 | GOP. So what exactly is going on? To get some perspective, I spoke with Professor Leah Wright-Rigur, |
| 2:00.7 | a historian at Johns Hopkins University. |
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