“When a lot of white Republicans get together and bring up race, even telling black people how they should see police and the world, it evokes the worst kind of emotion,”



Black Republicans See a White Convention, Heavy on Lectures




CLEVELAND — Mike Hill, a black Republican state representative in Florida, grew steadily more disheartened as he watched television clips of his party’s overwhelmingly white national convention lecturing African-Americans about the police and race relations.

There was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, nearly shouting Monday night that the police only wanted to help people, regardless of race. A sea of white convention delegates, cheering wildly as two black speakers ridiculed the Black Lives Matter movement and unconditionally praised law enforcement officers. And a series of speakers pushing Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order message and arguing, as he has, that the United States had lost its way.

“When a lot of white Republicans get together and bring up race, even telling black people how they should see police and the world, it evokes the worst kind of emotion,” said Mr. Hill, who supports Mr. Trump but decided to skip the convention. “We have so few black Republicans to begin with. Talking about race won’t bring us more.”

For many black Republicans, the party’s convention has veered unexpectedly and unhappily toward lecturing and moralizing on issues of race, an off-putting posture at a time when Mr. Trump is staggeringly unpopular with minority voters. He drew support from zero percent of African-Americans in recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he is struggling badly with Hispanics, partly because of his harsh language about Mexicans and immigrants.

These Republicans said they had preferred the political messages to black voters at recent conventions, where the focus was less on public safety and crime than on economic opportunity, job creation, support for small businesses and school choice — all issues, they said, that held appeal.

In Cleveland, however, Mr. Trump and Republican Party leaders are focused on appealing to white voters, particularly white men who are critical to their electoral strategy in the Midwest and the South.

Black Republicans said they understood the thinking behind this, but argued that it was based on politics more than on helping people or strengthening the country.

“When the Republican is getting only 5 or 6 percent of the black vote anyway, and the Democrat simply needs to say ‘I’m on your side’ to win the black vote, then what option do you have?” said Ward Connerly, a former regent at the University of California and a leader in national efforts to end affirmative action in college admissions. “You support law and order. That will bring out a certain amount of support for a lot of Americans who are afraid because they see society as crumbling.”

“Politically, it’s a smart move to make,” Mr. Connerly added, “but whether Republicans are solving the problems of the black underclass or not is another question.”


Several black political figures and candidates skipped the event altogether. “Haven’t been watching,” former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in an email.

And those who did speak from the podium seemed focused more on castigating black protesters, scolding other blacks for their behavior and exalting Mr. Trump than on trying to help Republicans make inroads with undecided or skeptical black voters.

“Somebody with a nice tan needs to say this: All lives matter!” declared Darryl Glenn, a commissioner of El Paso County, Colo., who is African-American, in a line that drew a thunderous ovation from delegates.

Mr. Glenn repeatedly struck a moralizing tone. “If we really want to heal our communities, more men need to start stepping up and taking care of their children,” he said at one point. “Safe neighborhoods happen when fathers and mothers are in the home,” he said at another.

The convention’s most prominent black speaker, Ben Carson, by contrast, suggested Tuesday night that Hillary Clinton was seeking to deceive poor blacks and other disadvantaged people.

“She would continue with a system that denigrates the education of our young people, puts them in a place where they’re never going to be able to get a job, where they’re always going to be dependent, and where therefore they can be cultivated for their votes,” Mr. Carson said. “This is not what America is all about.”

Though Mr. Carson and Mr. Glenn were enthusiastically received, their overtures to blacks seemed all the more discordant given the racial makeup of the audience in the convention hall here.

This convention has fewer black delegates and speakers than any in two decades, according to several African-American Republicans who are regulars at party gatherings. The Republican National Committee could not provide definitive counts of delegates by race; one party official estimated that there were 80 black delegates, but that was based on an informal crowd count that might have included people on the convention floor who were not delegates. There are 2,472 delegates in all.

Fred Brown, the chairman of the National Black Republican Council, said he had been going to Republican conventions since the 1970s and believed that this year’s convention was one of the whitest in memory.

“The Republican Party has not done enough to enrich the party and create an opportunity for black members to become more involved,” said Mr. Brown, 80, who lives in the Bronx.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/us/politics/black-republicans-convention.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Last edited by Goose (7/20/2016 5:40 am)