The New York Times has greeted the appointment of South Carolina congressman Tim Scott to succeed fellow Republican Jim DeMint in the Senate with an op-ed decrying the selection–and Scott himself–as “token.”

Adolph L. Reed Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, writes that Scott’s appointment (by a Indian-American Republican governor, no less) is a product of the GOP’s “desperate need to woo…minority voters.” Scott will be the first black Republican senator in more than 30 years, the only black senator in Congress next year, and the first black senator from the Deep South since Reconstruction.