Surprise! The Anti-DEI GOP is Facing a Diversity Problem in the House!
All four Black Republican reps. are leaving after this year, the New York Times reports.
Photo: Getty Images Politics congress
Starting next year, the number of Black Republicans in the House could go from four to zero. Geez. I wonder how that happened.
The New York Times on Saturday revealed the exodus, pointing out how Reps. Wesley Hunt (Tx.); John James (Mich.); and Byron Donalds (Fl.) are all retiring from the lower chamber to run for state office, while Rep. Burgess Owens’ (Utah) seat has basically been redistricted out, and by his own party. Per the outlet:
The exodus is a reflection of the striking and persistent lack of diversity in the G.O.P. ranks of Congress…
Republican leaders who for a time focused heavily on recruiting and electing more Black candidates appear to have allowed those efforts to flag during the second Trump presidency, as the president has denounced and eliminated diversity programs, fired Black officials while installing an overwhelmingly white senior team and presided over an administration that routinely circulates material echoing white-supremacist references, including a racist meme he posted himself. With the president’s gains with Black men dwindling, there are few Black Republicans running for Congress this year, and none regarded as likely to win.
“This is a Republican Party that is at war with Black America,” Chris Taylor, who serves as a senior advisor in the Congressional Black Caucus PAC, told the NYT. “It’s going to be really hard for even the most conservative Black Republican to look at this Republican Party and defend it.”
To add to the Trump administration’s abysmal track record of eliminating diversity, it’s under Trump 2.0—and a stupid anti-DEI executive order he signed in March—that Black history has suffered in the last year. In September, the National Park Service removed a historic photograph depicting the scars of an escaped enslaved man from a park in Louisiana; in January, the NPS took down a memorial in Philadelphia honoring those enslaved by George Washington; and, about a month later, it tried to recommend we stop referring to the Klansman who killed Medgar Evers as “racist.”
And maybe it’s because of one, two, or all of the things above that the GOP itself is seeing its worst acolytes create the most racist spaces possible. It seems every other minute there’s a group chat of racist young Republicans sharing with each other disgustingly racist rhetoric, such as the “I Love Hitler” chat in November in which transcripts revealed the “fa”-word, “r”-word, and “n”-word mentioned more than 251 times; and in which Black people were called “monkeys” and “watermelon people.” This chat, BTW, was the same one that Vice President JD Vance tried to pawn off as kids doing “stupid things.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.