Right-Wing Affirmative Action

The speakers the GOP puts on stage at their convention tell us a lot about how they view women and people of color.

You can tell a lot about a political party by who they elevate, and whose voices they believe speak to their audience. At the Republican National Convention, it’s been a parade of powerful white men — and a smattering of window-dressing women and racial minorities.

One of the more interesting aspects of conservative race and gender politics is that conservatives insist that they believe in race-blind and gender-blind equality, while also insisting that men and women are fundamentally different, especially insofar as men are more natural leaders than women (and probably more intelligent). The same GOP that claims it doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, or purple routinely uses Black and Latino Republicans as political props because they believe the appearance of diversity actually does matter. The underlying perspective seems to be that white men are indeed naturally more intelligent, skilled, and suited to leadership, but you’ve gotta stick a few women and minorities on your stage to make it look like you’re not racist or sexist. In my view, this goes a long way in explaining the right-wing hostility to DEI initiatives and policies like affirmative action: Many conservatives truly don’t believe that women and people of color are as competent and meritorious as white men, and as a result see these policies as tools that elevate the inadequate and lower overall quality (many liberals, myself included, have all kinds of issues with some of the more ridiculous DEI schemes, but generally see efforts to bolster racial and gender diversity as being about opening doors to people long shut out, not lowering any bars).

And so when conservatives are trying to diversity their own spaces, they do exactly what they accuse liberals of: They elevate a bunch of absolute yahoos based primarily on those yahoos’ race and gender.

Now, in conservatives’ defense, they suffer no shortage of white and male yahoos, and they are also happy to elevate these men into positions of power (see, e.g., Donald J. Trump). But as the Republican Party gathers for its convention, it’s worth looking at who they put on stage — and what that says about who the party wants to be.