Juan Williams: Republicans making 2024 about race — but they’re on the wrong side

For the GOP these days it is all about racial politics.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) recently ran an ad he calls “Cotton to Congress.” He spoke about his grandfather, who did not learn to read because, in the then-segregated South, he left school to pick cotton. Imagine the right-wing media convulsions if a Black Democrat, looking to run for president, promoted his family as victims of the awful history of white-landowner exploitation of black sharecroppers?

Fellow Republican Nikki Haley has played that card, too. In announcing her 2024 run for president, the former South Carolina governor focused on growing up a town where train tracks “divided the town by race.” Haley said she was “not black, not white, I was different,” as the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Imagine Vice President Kamala Harris talking about the harsh, enforced lines of southern segregation. Republicans would excoriate her for focusing on racial division and being “woke.” They might describe her as playing the “race card” to advance her political career.

Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is playing a different kind of race game as he prepares for a possible run for the White House in 2024. He directed his state Department of Education to purge an advanced course in African American history from the state curriculum. Two books that were banned for a time in Florida under DeSantis’ order to minimize the study of American racism were the heroic stories of baseball players Hank Aaron and Roberto Clemente.

DeSantis’ culture war is all about airbrushing Black history by pushing the stories of those great athletes out of libraries because their efforts, as a Black and a Latino, to overcome white racism is as much a part of their triumphs as their tremendous skill on the baseball field.

Scott, Haley and DeSantis are sending signals that, for the GOP, the 2024 elections will be a back alley of racial politics — eight years after the first Black president of the United States, Barack Obama, left office.

The racial resentment that too many white Republicans held against Obama began with the Tea Party’s opposition to his health care plan as benefitting the poor — meaning “Black” and “immigrant.” The “birther” movement attacks on Obama helped to make Donald Trump a conservative media star and paved his way to the presidency.

While in office, Trump called for professional athletes protesting police brutality against Blacks to be fired. He also said there were some “very fine people, on both sides” of a deadly white nationalist-dominated protest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. After leaving office in disgrace, Trump was impeached for inciting a riot of his mostly white supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. One rioter was photographed carrying a massive Confederate flag through the U.S. Capitol.

The Supreme Court is set to ignite more racial division this summer. It is widely anticipated that the conservative majority (including three justices nominated by Trump) will end the use of affirmative action in college admissions. The High Court’s 2013 decision to gut the Voting Rights Act’s protections of minority voters set a political blaze that remains at the center of arguments over Black voter disenfranchisement. An essential part of Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen is that Democrats pile up votes in big cities full of Blacks and immigrants.

The Republicans’ focus on crime is another wink-and-nod at racial politics. They claim to stand for “law-and-order,” despite violent crime rising across the nation with the highest spikes in states run by Republicans. And their embrace of gun culture is a key factor in violent crime. Despite mass shootings becoming more common throughout the nation, the GOP has a history of pushing the racial fear button to alarm suburbanites with talk of crime spreading from cities.

The GOP, in the era of Trump’s dominance of the party, is doubling down on white identity politics while dismissing outreach to minorities with conservative values.

Ten years ago, Gallup polling found the GOP to be an 89 percent white party; in an email to me, a Gallup representative provided numbers showing that, by 2021, the number remained high, at 85 percent. Yet the nation’s white population has decreased by 8.6 percent in the last ten years as America has become more racially diverse.

The GOP, however, is headed in the other direction.

Even when a person of color, such as Tim Scott or Nikki Haley, appears on the GOP ticket, that person often is called on by other Republicans to stand against protections for voting rights, affirmative action and police reform. Many Republicans now even stand against corporate efforts on environment, social and governance [ESG] investing that includes promoting racial diversity.

Today’s politics includes beating up on the first multiracial and first female vice president, Kamala Harris. Despite Harris always taking a backseat to President Biden, the incessant GOP attack on her reveals their fear of her as a future presidential candidate.

Condoleezza Rice, a Republican and the first black woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of State, described slavery as America’s “birth defect.” Exploiting the pain of that “defect” is now a feature of Trump-era GOP politics.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.