Critics such as Glenn Kessler who have come after Tim Scott are just embarrassing themselves.
There’s a certain kind of political observer that becomes not only frustrated, but consumed by the existence of black conservatives. It’s an angry club with no partisan allegiance, and it has come out in full force after it was announced that Senator Tim Scott would be delivering the GOP response to the speech President Biden will make to a Joint Session of Congress next week.
First, a few characters from the grifter, vice-signaling right made their displeasure known. Dave Reaboi lamented Scott’s selection by calling it “so typically GOP—’hey, let’s get a black guy to push back on the Left’s assertion that white people are demons.’ We don’t need anyone of any creed or color to tell us we’re not demons.” At a certain point, the Reabois of the world must be asked under what circumstances a non-white person can be selected for a task within the conservative movement without being accused of being a token. Jesse Kelly, too, was deeply upset by the announcement. After highlighting a grotesque tweet from Senator Cory Booker about the Ma’Khia Bryant shooting in Columbus earlier this week, Kelly attacked Scott for “working with [Booker] on a federal police reform law.” If working with bad people with bad ideas on legislation is considered a disqualifying act in his book, he’ll have to expand his list of targets, as “working with bad people” is a decent job description for “United States Senator.” If Scott sponsors objectionable legislation with Booker, I’ll critique him as well. Failing that, Kelly’s charge makes for an embarrassing reach.
The coup de grâce of broken-brain Scott-slander, though, comes courtesy of Glenn Kessler, fact-checker for the Washington Post. “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale,” reads Kessler’s headline. Never mind that Scott has never hidden that his family owned a farm in South Carolina after being freed from slavery; or that it’s true that his grandfather dropped out of school at an early age to work on that farm; or that his mother inherited only five acres of land; or that Scott himself grew up in working-class poverty — Kessler is unimpressed by Scott’s rise, writing that “Scott tells a tidy story packaged for political consumption, but a close look shows how some of his family’s early and improbable success gets flattened and written out of his biography.” That Scott’s family owned some property in the Jim Crow South prior to Scott’s being born is enough to cause Kessler — a man born into wealth and privilege — to wonder aloud, in the pages of the Washington Post, if it’s all that impressive that a man born into a system designed to hold him back financially, educationally, and politically is serving in the United States Senate. In the words of Morgan Freeman’s Lucius Fox: Good luck!
Tim Scott is — like the rest of them — an imperfect politician. But the extent to which he inspires irrational ire is a testament not only to the character flaws of his critics, but also to the power of his story.