The headline in today's New York Times op-ed
by Adolph Reed is "The puzzle of black Republicans." For Reed, like so many liberals, men like Tim Scott, an African-American raised by a single mom, now the first black senator from South Carolina, are sell-outs because they don't have a "D" after their names. Scott doesn't "count" as authentically black because, after all, he does not buy into their worldview of racial victimization and retribution. Col. Allen West, Clarence Thomas, Tom Sowell, Walter Williams are reviled by the Left more than the garden variety conservatives because of their skin color. So while Barack Obama is heralded for being "the first," Scott is merely a GOP token. Read Reed's dripping condescension:
[T]his “first black” rhetoric tends to interpret African-American political successes — including that of President Obama — as part of a morality play that dramatizes “how far we have come.” It obscures the fact that modern black Republicans have been more tokens than signs of progress.
The cheerleading over racial symbolism plays to the Republicans’ desperate need to woo (or at least appear to woo) minority voters, who favored Mr. Obama over Mitt Romney by huge margins. Mrs. Haley — a daughter of Sikh immigrants from Punjab, India — is the first female and first nonwhite governor of South Carolina, the home to white supremacists like John C. Calhoun, Preston S. Brooks, Ben Tillman and Strom Thurmond.