It’s common knowledge among the thinking crowd—a class that seems to shrink more and more each day—that there is a significant overlap between the Republican Party and American racism. American racism, of course, is much too prolific to be pigeonholed into a singular category of any kind. It is a far greater, craftier, and more destructive evil than that which could be monopolized by a lone group. It transcends people, states, tax brackets, cultures, professions, and certainly political parties.
This being said, it should be clear that it would be an egregious oversimplification to refer to the Republican Party as the party of racism and the Democratic Party (and other liberal-leaning parties) as the party of antiracism, for both racists and antiracists constitute some of each party’s ranks. Still, the record of Republican racism stands out more than that of other political parties for several reasons, the most obvious of which being the short-lived political career of the previous president.
Trump and the Southern Strategy
Donald Trump, a Republican, struck the match that ignited the long-since gasoline-doused United States, greatly intensifying violent racial tensions that have existed since the birth of the nation (and long before D. W. Griffith’s 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation). He courted support from and refused to condemn white supremacist organizations, vilified the notion that black lives matter, enthusiastically promoted the white supremacist-backed “birther movement” which groundlessly denied the fact of forty-fourth president Barack Obama’s natural-born American citizenship and was directly responsible for a profound uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes, among other things. Despite Trump’s racism, millions of American conservatives continue to support him or his racist ideology, including mayors, governors, and members of Congress.
At the risk of stating the obvious, it should be noted that the intersection of American conservatism and racism predates Donald Trump’s catastrophic presidency. Through the mid-twentieth-century “Southern strategy,” the Republican Party appealed to (and exacerbated) Southern racism in an effort to secure the votes of white Americans. Republican president George H. W. Bush’s infamous “Willie Horton” political attack ad was a notable product of the strategy, serving to stoke racial animosity and the fear of black Americans by insinuating that Bush’s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, would allow dangerous black criminals to run rampant. Former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman later apologized to the NAACP for the party’s execution of the strategy as a whole, confirming what many already knew: Republicans often back racists, and vice versa.
Today, Republican politicians continue to perpetuate their sordid reputation by disavowing the necessity of black activism, challenging the teaching of black American history, suppressing the black vote, and a host of other offenses too various to name in a single paragraph. Through these efforts, which Republican voters overwhelmingly support, the Southern strategy lives on.
Even if we take Mehlman’s apology to the NAACP to be sincere, it also undoubtedly served as an attempt to get black voters to stop seeing the Republican Party as the party of racism. At some level, and perhaps at the only level, it sought atonement for the party’s sins in hopes of future political gain. Given that Mehlman’s apology took place in 2005 and that the same racist fearmongering and instigating lives on today, I don’t believe that we should be expecting another apology any time soon, if ever. Republican politicians show no indication of acknowledging their culpability and are now trying their hand at a different strategy to free themselves from the white supremacist weeds.
I’m Rubber, You’re Glue
Trump’s patented “nuh uh” tactic in response to accusations of racism (“I’m the least racist person there is anywhere in the world”) didn’t end with his time in the nation’s highest office. Likeminded politicians deny the frequent and often justifiable allegations invariably and just as inarticulately, but they seem to have transformed it into something more closely resembling “I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.”
Republicans have a knack for shirking responsibility for their racist attitudes and policies by attempting to pin them on somebody else. Trump was well-versed in this technique and demonstrated it in his demonization of critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement as bigoted and exclusionary. During his presidency, he even issued an executive order targeting racial sensitivity training in federal workplaces, asserting that such practices “indoctrinate government employees with divisive and harmful sex and race-based ideologies.” “If I point my finger at the people criticizing me,” one can assume he thought, “then no one will see that they’re right.” In most cases, as in this one, Republicans simply point back the same finger that was pointed at them.
From White to Woke
Conspiracy theorists, Republican politicians, and conspiracy theorists who are also Republican politicians (a terrifying and all-too-common combination) have put the technique to use by corrupting the definition of the word “woke,” a product of African American Vernacular English that Merriam-Webster defines as “aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).” It’s so darkly appropriate that conservatives chose to turn a positive black term into a pejorative that it’s almost poetic. To them, “woke” means delusional, trifling, antagonistic, virtue-signaling, and, also according to Merriam-Webster, who never should’ve had to sully their pages with such reactionary drivel, “politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme.”
As if it wasn’t enough to be ideologically averse to the pursuit of justice, which is the only rational way one can interpret the disapproval of the word “woke,” Republicans also began bandying about the term “woke supremacy” to denote the imaginary liberal world-domination plan they’re bent on convincing their supporters of. Step aside white supremacy, woke supremacy is the real threat of the day. South Carolina’s junior Republican Senator Tim Scott, who is black (which I have to believe he thinks makes anything he says about racism true), had no qualms about exposing his and his party’s shameless scapegoating campaign, telling Fox News in 2021 that “Woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy. We need to take that seriously.” As bad as white supremacy. But how many bodies have woke supremacy hanged from trees? Years before Trump’s mockery of a presidency or Scott’s faux pas, conservative literary journal The New Criterion ran an op-ed claiming that “False accusations of racism are just as offensive as racism itself.” Again, how many students have false accusations of racism turned fire hoses onto?
Speaking of shamelessness, Republicans have also taken to quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech to justify racist policymaking and ideology. According to them, black studies needn’t be taught in schools, racial sensitivity training is unnecessary, and black, antiracist activism is prejudiced because King dreamed that his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” To do one’s level best to stamp out the flame of American racism, then, only serves to make it burn brighter. How can they be racist, they ask, when it’s in fact their opponents that are the racists? Even Dr. King said we shouldn’t be teaching black schoolchildren their own history, right? You black folks like him, don’t you?
Some don’t even pretend to try veiling their senselessness. Last year, Jerone Davison, a black former professional football player from Arizona who tried and thankfully failed to run for a Republican seat in the House of Representatives, ran an ad that challenged gun reform by claiming that the ownership of an assault rifle is necessary when it’s “the only thing standing between your family and a dozen angry Democrats in Klan hoods.” I’m not even going to touch that one.
A speech of Dr. King’s you won’t find Republicans quoting is one in which he observes that “One of the most common tendencies of human nature is that of placing responsibility on some external agency for sins we have committed or mistakes we have made. We are forever attempting to find some scapegoat on which we cast responsibility for our actions.” His apparent fan club could stand to learn from this. “Personal response is the determining factor in our lives,” says King, “and herein lies our area of responsibility.”