Racism isn’t new. It’s been woven into American culture and government policies throughout much of our nation’s history.
Republished with permission from Arizona Mirror, by Elvia Díaz
The racist attacks targeting Arizona Republicans Kimberly Yee and Quang Nguyen are among the ugliest moments of this year’s Arizona primary.
They’re also entirely predictable.
Yee is the state treasurer and Chinese American. Rep. Nguyen, who’s seeking re-election, is Vietnamese.
Both are conservative Republicans, but ideology doesn’t shield them from racism within a political movement that has long stoked it.
Consider Yee first.
She’s hoping to defeat Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne in the July 21 Republican primary for schools chief.
Yee is a formidable candidate, which explains why an independent political group tried to boost Horne with a digital ad portraying her as the “Empress of DEI.”
Everything about the ad was designed to emphasize her ethnicity. The imagery and the music were unmistakably Chinese. It accused Yee of leading a “national shadow government of bureaucrats pushing an extreme diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.”
Both Yee and Horne condemned the ad as racist.
“I’m shocked by the appeal to ethnic prejudice and I denounce it,” said Horne, urging the California-based dark-money group Arizonans for Election Integrity to pull the ad.
His plea was ignored, and the ad continued running through July 2 as planned, generating hundreds of thousands of views and a ton of media coverage.
It did its job. The dark-money group appealed to ethnic prejudice. Horne condemned it. Republican voters still saw Yee portrayed as a suspicious Chinese “empress.”
Plus, Tom Horne was shocked by ethnic prejudice? Give me a break.
This is the same Tom Horne who wraps himself in Martin Luther King Jr.’s words about judging people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.
Yet as attorney general, he dismantled the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson,he rails against critical race theory, a concept he can’t even define, and brags about opposing stereotyping students while doing exactly that.
All that to say, the ad attacking Yee accomplished exactly what it was intended to do.
It allowed Horne to denounce racism publicly while Republican primary voters were left with an image of Yee as an untrustworthy foreigner with an agenda that threatens Arizona classrooms.
In a column for The Hill, Juan Williams argued that the MAGA movement includes “two types of members: people who are racists, and people willing to play along by pretending there is no racism.”
Which one fits Horne?
The second-ugliest moment (so far) came courtesy of Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point USA. He apparently couldn’t resist spilling his prejudice onto a social media exchange that touted endorsements of a state race, including that of Nguyen.
Bowyer claimed Nguyen had the worst score from his group. Nguyen dismissed the claim as fake and called Bowyer “a clown.” Bowyer replied: “Can you speak English?”
Was that fair criticism? Absolutely not. Would Bowyer question Nguyen’s English proficiency if he wasn’t Vietnamese?
This kind of racism isn’t new. It’s been woven into American culture and government policies throughout much of our nation’s history.
This year, as Americans celebrate the country’s founding ideal that “all men are created equal,” it’s worth remembering that the promise has never been equally extended to people of color.
Black people, for instance, still face all sorts of discrimination, and immigrants remain convenient political pawns.
Virtually every minority group has endured discriminatory laws and media stereotyping.
Hollywood once portrayed Asians as perpetual foreign threats, the Irish as drunken brawlers and Mexicans as servants, bandits or criminals.
Popular media has evolved a lot, but too many politicians haven’t. President Donald Trump has brought all that racism to the forefront of his agenda and American politics, repeatedly characterizing Mexicans as criminals and falsely claiming that Haitian people are “eating their dogs.” Arizona Republicans quickly followed suit with their own racist attack.
Clearly, the attacks on Yee and Nguyen aren’t isolated campaign-season missteps.
They’re part of a long political playbook used by politicians who get to deny racism while exploiting it and by others who openly embrace MAGA’s white nationalist tendencies.
Racism isn’t exclusive to Republicans, of course. But today’s Republican Party no longer treats it as politically disqualifying. More than that, it is increasingly acceptable among GOP voters and candidates openly exploit that.
Conservatism doesn’t require membership in a political movement that blatantly stokes racial resentment.
So, why do Yee and Nguyen remain in MAGA’s Republican Party? Their continued association sends its own message.
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