Utah Senator Mike Lee has received backlash after posting a collage of the four Black Republican House members to his personal X account to prove his party doesn’t have a diversity problem. “This is …
Utah Senator Mike Lee has received backlash after posting a collage of the four Black Republican House members to his personal X account to prove his party doesn’t have a diversity problem.
“This is not the party of Jim Crow,” he wrote, above the four headshots.
The problem is, come January, none of them will be in Congress anymore. None of the four men are running for re-election, and Republicans are not expected to add any other Black faces to their congressional delegation at the midterms.
The four departing congressmen are Wesley Hunt of Texas, John James of Michigan, Byron Donalds of Florida, and Burgess Owens of Utah.
James and Donalds are running for governor in their respective states, Hunt took a tilt at a Senate slot and lost, and Owens is retiring because redistricting in Utah remade his seat as nominally Democrat.
“These are the only 4 black ppl in the Republican caucus and they’re all leaving office next year. Yet here you are flexing like your entire political ideology isn’t undergirded by racism, lol,” one X user replied.
Another user pointed out that even if the four were sticking around it wasn’t a shining example of representation.
“4 entire black men (no black women) in a body of 435??? You really made it!” they pointed out.
The four men were specifically recruited to the GOP as part of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s diversity push. The effort to increase Black representation within the party appears to have departed with McCarthy.
Come January, just one Black Republican will remain on Capitol Hill: Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
“When I look at my party, we look like the most restrictive country club in America,” McCarthy said in 2023 speech after leaving Congress.
Despite being reminded of all this by X users after he posted the picture, Lee continued to post memes about the Democrats being the real “party of Jim Crow,” a line popular among MAGA mouthpieces due to the history of Jim Crow laws being implemented by Southern Democrats.
That line of attack ignores the realignment of the two parties in the first half of the twentieth century, when Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt expanded the social safety net, led America through the Great Depression, and secured the votes of 75 percent of Black American voters.
The civil rights movement solidified the flip.
When the conservative justices on the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in April, Republicans welcomed the move—dubbed by Democrats Jim Crow 2.0.
He reposted his own goal again a few hours later.
Source: Utah News