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| Leah Wright Rigueur is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She is the author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power |
via Princeton Press:
The Republican Party has a Race Problem. Actually, that’s an understatement. The modern Republican Party has a race crisis – one of epic proportions. In the 2012 election, 80 percent of all non-white voters (Black, Hispanic, Asians and other minority groups), voted for President Barack Obama. Nowhere was this more apparent then with black voters – only 6 percent supported Republican nominee Mitt Romney. That’s the lowest amount of support a Republican presidential nominee has received since 1964.
The GOP’s 2013 autopsy report said it best noting that unless the party got serious about tackling the race issue, it would “lose future elections.” And in some respects, some within the party have tried to make racial inroads, particularly among black voters. Unfortunately the Republican presidential primaries have made those outreach efforts a distant memory, as candidates appear to be tripping over themselves to say the most racially offensive things possible. From police brutality jokes, to “media manipulation” comments, to “free stuff” gaffes, the hits keep coming.
The racial gaffes of the primary contenders are a reflection of a party that has a fundamental discomfort with discussing race. That the party has a torturous relationship to racial minorities in 2015 is unsurprising, given that GOP’s public attempts to wrestle with race have been near non-existent except in moments of antagonism.
So where did things go wrong? How did the “Party of Lincoln” fall by the wayside and move so far away from its “civil rights” roots?
Read the full article HERE.