Republican convention set to break a record—for whiteness

Rss@dailykos.com (mark Sumner) · Wednesday, June 08, 2016, 1:53 pm

If you want to sum up the state of the Republican Party, you could do it with a single statistic.

According to a June 1 email sent to an undisclosed list of recipients by Telly Lovelace, the national director for African American initiatives and urban media for the Republican National Committee, so far, only 18 of the 2,472 delegates headed to the Cleveland convention next month will be black. Just 18!

When scanning the faces at a Donald Trump rally, “diversity” is not the first word that comes to mind. The same is true of the GOP in general. Despite making noise about outreach, the party continues to run on policies that aren’t simply nationalist, aren’t merely anti-immigrant, but are deliberately meant to harm people of color. The problem goes way beyond calling judges Mexican or threatening Muslims.

The 14 delegates at the 1964 convention were just 1 percent of the total, the lowest ever. If the numbers for the 2016 convention hold, the 18 African Americans in Cleveland will be just 0.7 percent of the total delegates.

It’s not as if the Republican Party had made great progress at building bridges to the minority community in the period between 1964 and 2016, but one thing is clear: They’ve burned those bridges, and they plan to party on the ashes.

http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/Vtnt6OFdilc/-Republican-convention-set-to-break-a-record-for-whiteness