“The Republican Convention’s Speaker Lineup Is Largely White,” was the ABC News headline eight years ago, noting that only three of the 2016 Republican National Convention’s sixty-three speakers that year were black. As Donald Trump prepared to be nominated by a deeply divided Republican party, the headline seemed to confirm every negative thing that had been said about him.
It’s a different picture this year. As the GOP works to neutralize one of the Democratic Party’s central attacks on Trump and the party as a whole, and to capitalize on polls that show the former president significantly growing his support from non-white voters, one of the central themes of the 2024 RNC can be summed up as, You’ve been lied to that Donald Trump is a racist, and you’re not racist if you vote for him.
Similar to the RNC in 2020, the GOP has worked hard this year to up the diversity of its speakers. The RNC’s first night featured five black Republican elected officials, with Dallas mayor Eric Johnson — a former Democrat who switched parties last year, making the city the country’s largest one run by a GOP mayor — taking the stage the next night. They and others took part in a convention event, pitched as the first of its kind at a Republican convention, held by the recently founded the Black Republican Mayor’s Association to honor the party’s black delegates.
“The Republican Party isn’t a scary place for black folks,” the group’s founder Aurora mayor Richard Irvin told those assembled.
Night one also featured model Amber Rose, who told the story of her conversion to being a Trump supporter in a speech roundly praised by CNN talking heads. Rose had “for a long time believed those lies” and “left-wing propaganda” about the former president being a racist, she said, until she did her own research and realized that Trump and his supporters “don’t care if you’re black, white, gay, or straight — it’s all…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
