“The most frequently mentioned Republican contenders for the 2024 Republican nomination are former South Carolina Gov. And U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton,” or so Kevin McVicker noted recently in the Washington Examiner.
Four of those top six prospects mentioned are not white. That’s a good thing.
It means that, for the first time in history, a majority of the serious contestants for the office of president in the Republican Party, a party that disdains quotas and preferences and takes merit and viability as its only credentials, are not old, white men.
The system is working exactly as one would hope. In this country, the descendants of slaves and of immigrants from any place on this globe can not only thrive but even attain great power, vying with the nation’s most powerful people for the world’s most powerful office.
Barack Obama was our first nonwhite president, but his father was Kenyan. He was raised by the family of his white mother, whose ancestors settled New England in the 17th century. Tim Scott, were he to run and win, would be the first president descended from slaves, and the first to realize Martin Luther King’s dream of 1963, that the children of slaves and the children of slaveholders would join together in one union.
How bizarre is it that this racial awakening has taken place during the tenure of President Trump, derided by some as a white supremacist throwback — and indeed, that in direct defiance of elite liberal opinion about what they should think and believe, nonwhite voters supported Trump in larger numbers after seeing him in office for four years?
The national reaction to the death of George Floyd was so different from the deaths of black men at the hands of white officers that had happened before this that it justifiably stands as a milestone. The killing of Eric Garner in Staten Island had been more clearly unintended. The shooting of Michael Brown had been in self-defense. But there was no way to qualify or explain the circumstances around Floyd’s death. Long before the protests degenerated into riots and looting, Floyd’s death in police custody generated unprecedented universal anger around the nation among people of all political stripes and all races.
Somehow, between Missouri and Minnesota, and without conscious help from our current president, the national psyche changed. Obama, Bill Clinton, and both of the Bushes, who had taken their New England consciences with them when they moved down to Texas, would have loved to be president when all of this happened. The irony was that it was Trump, who is not a bigot, but is also is not as consciously well intentioned as all of the others.
On Dec. 9, the Associated Press reported that, in this last election, Republicans seized four House seats from Democrats in California for the first time in the past 20 years. Two of the four Republican winners were women, both immigrants from South Korea, and the two others were children of immigrants from Mexico and Portugal.
Whatever you say about Trump, and a lot can be said that isn’t too pleasant, he has presided over an era in which sensitivity toward racism has increased and in which nonwhite candidates are assuming major leadership roles in his party. It cannot be said loudly enough that the never-ending false charges of Republican racism are becoming harder and harder to substantiate.
