Saturday, Sept. 30, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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Tim Scott spouted a special kind of evil during the second Republican presidential primary debate.
It was supremely idiotic and indecent in the extreme.
It was disgusting, an immorality in service of white conservatives he believes require a level of evil, idiocy and indecency, an immorality so profound it ought to shock the conscience. Scott said what he said because he believes that’s what his target audience wants to hear. He’s convinced the white conservatives he needs to secure the GOP presidential nomination have no morals, no principles, not even a grade school understanding of slavery or its effects.
They should feel as much shame for how little he thinks of them as he should for having held forth on whitewashed nonsense. Scott’s absurdity comes amid a period in which too many conservatives in too many states have been fighting to implement a Lost Cause 2.0, to shave off the edges of the worst of this country’s history, to reestablish comfortable lies and myths.
The first Black man from the Deep South to have won a seat in the U.S. Senate since Reconstruction stood on a stage and compared the struggles Black people faced during race-based chattel slavery — slavery! — to when entitlement programs got their start. He made it clear he believed Black people had it better under slavery — slavery! — or at least less bad.
“Black families survived slavery,” Scott said. “We survived poll taxes and literacy tests. We survived discrimination being woven into the laws of our country. What was hard to survive was (President Lyndon) Johnson’s Great Society where they decided to put money … where they decided to take the Black father out of the household to get a check in the mail and you can now measure that in unemployment, in crime and devastation.”
David Duke and Richard Spencer couldn’t have said it better.
Scott’s words weren’t just offensive, but flat wrong. The Black unemployment rate fell during Johnson’s time in office and Black poverty declined — even though Black people were decades from being able to fully utilize the Great Society programs the way white people did from the outset.
He decided that slavery was the right comparison. Slavery! He wasn’t satisfied with making a policy argument, couldn’t just say he believed conservatives have better ideas and explain why he was the best candidate to turn them into reality when in the White House.
He had to bring slavery into it — slavery! — the period during which the white enslaver could rape any Black woman he wanted at any time, no matter her marital status. Or sell off a Black husband or a Black wife or Black kids for whatever reason he wanted. It was referring to the period in which a third of Black families were torn asunder during the Second Middle Passage alone.
Scott represents the first state to secede from the Union, the state where the Civil War began after Citadel cadets fired on the federal installation Fort Sumter. South Carolina was the only state in which at least half of all white households included enslaved people.
Scott knows this. He’s no dummy. Not too long ago, he spoke forthrightly about systemic racism, how even as a U.S. senator he was racially profiled several times while going to work in D.C. But he’s also the Black man who made it easier for white Evangelical Christians in the state to accept Donald Trump when he jumped onto the Trump train even before Nikki Haley and Lindsey Graham.
That’s why what he did was so devastating. Since Haley appointed him to replace the retiring Sen. Jim DeMint, I’ve struggled to respect the man, knowing his is a precarious position in my native South Carolina. After what I saw Wednesday night, that struggle ended.
Scott has made his choice — an ugly, pernicious one unworthy of anyone’s respect.
Issac Bailey is a columnist for The Charlotte (N.C.) Observer.
