Four days after a Republican primary debate in Miami where he was “long-winded, off-topic and boring,” Sen. Scott Tim Scott, R-S.C., announced Sunday that he was suspending his campaign for president. “I think the voters, who are the most remarkable people on the planet, have been really clear that they’re telling me: not now,” he told former GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, now a Fox News host.
Is there a Black Republican candidate who can be honest about his or her experiences as a Black person while campaigning for the country’s highest office?
When, if ever, will it be the time for the Black Republican presidential candidate? Can there ever be one who doesn’t have to deny the existence (or at least the impact) of racism in a run for the White House? Who doesn’t feel compelled — as Scott so often did, and as Ben Carson and Herman Cain so often did — to portray other Black people as broken?
“I don’t believe racism in this country today holds anybody back in a big way,” Cain said in 2011. In 2015, Carson, who was in Ferguson, Missouri, the year after a white police officer shot and killed Black teenager Michael Brown, said that he wasn’t sure whether there had been wrongful targeting of Black people but that he did see a problem with safety-net programs, saying, “We need to be looking at all the factors that have kept the Black community in a very dependent position for decades.”
Is there a Black Republican candidate who can be honest about his or her experiences as a Black person while campaigning for the country’s highest office? Or is dishonesty about race in America the price of admission?
In July 2016, the week after a police officer in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, shot and killed Alton Sterling and a police officer in St. Anthony, Minnesota, shot and killed Philando Castile, Scott gave a speech on the floor of the Senate. He told the story of how, in one year of life as an elected official, police had pulled him over seven times. Once he was…
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