The party’s three leading candidates are speaking about history and race in polarizing and provocative ways that sometimes diverge from or distort the facts, some political strategists, experts and civil rights leaders said
Former president Donald Trump uses dehumanizing rhetoric to describe undocumented immigrants before largely White audiences. The runaway GOP polling leader says they are “poisoning the blood of our country” — comments some experts have compared to Adolf Hitler’s writings on blood purity.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis defended part of his state’s African American history curriculum standards that claimed some enslaved people developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.” And Nikki Haley omitted any mention of slavery when she was asked to explain the cause of the Civil War at a town hall event this past week. It wasn’t until the next day that Haley acknowledged the war was “about slavery.”
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But their rhetoric is also appealing to many Americans who lean conservative, interviews with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire show, including some who reject the accusations that the statements are racially insensitive or worse. Many in the GOP are resentful of liberal leaders who they see as constantly pointing out or forcing the country to apologize for past atrocities, and some are angry about demographic and cultural shifts in America driven in part by immigration.
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He pointed to how Republican leaders targeted Colin Kaepernick, the biracial former NFL quarterback who took a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality and social injustice, and tangled with NASCAR after it banned the Confederate flag at events.
The pattern of Republican leaders inflaming the debate over racial issues has played out in countless ways after America’s conversation about race was thrust to the forefront by the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first Black president.
He accused an “unhinged left-wing mob” of trying to “vandalize our history, desecrate our monuments” and “demolish our heritage.” In 2021, Republican lawmakers in state legislatures across the country led campaigns against the teaching of critical race theory, an academic framework that holds that racism is systemic in America.
Over her career, Haley has spoken in high-profile ways about race, particularly when she made the decision to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds in South Carolina after the racist massacre at a Black church in Charleston in 2015.
After the fatal shooting of Walter Scott, a Black man who was shot in the back by a police officer after a traffic stop in 2015, Haley signed a bill requiring law enforcement to wear body cameras.
The Florida governor this year defended new African American history standards in his state that said students should learn “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” while discussing how they did work ranging from farming to blacksmithing.
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