Tim Scott Deserves Better

O ne of the less famous figures of the civil-rights movement was Lincoln Ragsdale, a veteran Tuskegee Airman who was instrumental in desegregation efforts in Arizona, where his work was supported financially and politically by his friend Barry Goldwater, at that time a prominent businessman with growing political ambitions. When Ragsdale and his wife, Eleanor, moved into a previously all-white neighborhood in Phoenix, cowardly vandals, operating under cover of darkness, painted the word “ni****” in two-foot-high letters on the front of his house. His neighbors, both sympathetic and embarrassed, offered to repair the damage, but Ragsdale refused to paint over the slur. Why? “I wanted to make sure that the white folks knew where the ni**** lived,” he said.

I thought of Lincoln Ragsdale when I read about Twitter blocking the label “Uncle Tim” and other racial slurs directed at Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican who delivered the televised response to President Joe Biden’s recent speech to Congress. Twitter would have been doing a great public service if it had left that vile stuff right there in the sunlight where it could be clearly seen and understood. Like the graffiti painted on Lincoln Ragsdale’s home, it isn’t an indictment of the man targeted — it is a confession made publicly by his enemies. This is who they are.

Senator Scott is famously deft with this sort of thing. When a nice liberal on Twitter described him as a “house nigga,” he offered a simple correction:

“Senate.”

Senator Scott is reliably described as “the only black Republican in the Senate,” which he is, but he also was described that way when he was the only black senator of any party. A maximum of one black senator was an operating norm for a long time: It was only when Mo Cowan was appointed to the Massachusetts seat vacated by John Kerry in 2013 that the Senate had two black members at the same time — 143 years after Republican Hiram Revels of Mississippi became the first black senator, appointed by the state’s Reconstruction legislature.

(The first popularly elected black senator was Republican Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, elected in 1966. The Democrats did not elect their first black senator, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois, until 1992.)

The Democrats maintain a party of organized hatreds — they do not have a philosophy; they have an enemies’ list — and they harbor no hatred as intense as the one they nurse for Republicans who are not white men, which is why Senator Scott has been dismissed as a man who “only darkened the upper chamber’s complexion,” as one Washington Post columnist put it. Senator Scott is not alone in this: Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a Republican who at the time of her election was the youngest woman to serve in the House, is hated with a special intensity. Nikki Haley, a Republican and the first woman to serve as governor of South Carolina, is subjected to slurs directed at her Punjabi ancestry.

For the Democrats, there is exactly one mode of public life available to those who are not white, male, heterosexual, etc.: as Democrats. The attitude is distinctly proprietary.

Of course, all people of good faith recoil from slurs of the kind directed at Senator Scott. (All people of good faith? “That’s not enough — I need a majority!”) But that is a simple thing — simple decency. In some ways, it is more troubling — because it is more powerful than a mere slur — that the Democratic party practices a racialized politics that instrumentalizes African Americans, Latinos, women, etc., as agents of its exclusive interest. This produces intellectual flaccidity — the Democrats howl that the Donald Trump–era GOP is a party of “white nationalism” when it is in fact a party that just did better among black and Latino voters than it had in years — but it also produces moral confusion.

There is much that is wrong and destructive in the Black Lives Matter movement, and neither the interests of African Americans as individual citizens nor the interests of African-American communities have been served by the riots, political violence, looting, arson, and general chaos that have at times accompanied the movement’s protests. But the fundamental complaint is a sound one: African Americans remain socially and politically burdened in unique ways that at times prevent their full participation in our national life. This is not news to Americans, and it certainly is not news to conservatives. A police confrontation is the most dramatic and high-stakes interaction that most people will ever have with the forcible aspect of the state, and for this reason social energies that are persistent and omnipresent may be expressed during these encounters in an especially intense way. The question of deadly police force necessarily has a special character, but it is bound up with a larger and more complex social reality.

About how best to secure the rights and interests — and lives — of African Americans, there are two main schools of thought. Conservatives have long embraced — always imperfectly and often half-heartedly — the individualist approach, the view that African Americans ought to be understood first and foremost as individuals and citizens rather than as members of a racial minority or a social and political group. Some conservatives would prefer that the United States go as far as our revolutionary cousins in France, where the government makes a point of refusing even to keep racial statistics, recognizing only two categories of people: (1) French, and (2) other. The Left and the Democratic party have generally embraced the opposite approach, one that envisions not a republic composed of individual citizens but a “multiracial democracy” in which the most important social units are solidarity groupings defined by one criterion or another: race, sex, sexual orientation, etc. Conservatives are more moved by the account of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., whose indictment of American society was always that it failed to live up to its own ideals, whereas progressives are more in tune with Malcolm X, who insisted that questions of identity must always be at the center of power relations.

(Of course the Reverend King was no William F. Buckley–style conservative, or any kind of conservative, just as Malcolm X certainly was no Elizabeth Warren–style progressive.)

There are about 330 million Americans, and some of the many millions of them who are not white men fall into the conservative camp and identify, lacking some more attractive option, with the Republican party. One way of thinking about race and politics concludes that this is normal and healthy, that just as there is diversity among groups there is diversity within groups, and that our public life is richer for having Tim Scott in the Senate alongside Raphael Warnock and Cory Booker. A different way of thinking about race and politics — a backward one — insists that a special penalty should be inflicted on African Americans who have views and preferences at odds with the Democrat-ordained model of what African-American politics are supposed to be. It follows from the latter attitude that figures such as Senator Scott will be abused in racial terms, even though such abuse transgresses the rules of polite society, because such men not only are understood in racial terms but also, insofar as the Democratic political machine is concerned, defined by them.

Tim Scott is a black Republican senator, as well as a Protestant, a South Carolinian, a businessman, a former county official, a graduate of Charleston Southern University, a bachelor, and much else. But for his race-minded critics, only two of those things matter: that he is black and that he is a Republican — a combination that makes him, in their minds, an anomaly and an outrage.

Like the vandals at Lincoln Ragsdale’s house, they demand that he go back to where they have decided he belongs.