Tim Scott defends race comments on ‘The View’
The chatty daytime talk show “The View” may seem like an unlikely platform for Tim Scott, a South Carolina senator and presidential candidate, to gain a foothold with the Republican primary voters, but he saw an opening on Monday and tried to make it. most.
Mr Scott, the first black Republican elected to the Senate since Reconstruction, had asked for an audience on the show after a co-host, Joy Behar, said Mr Scott “don’t get it” when he denies the existence of systemic racism, and therefore, she said, he is a Republican.
Before a mostly white, partisan crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday, Mr. Scott had promised his performance would make sparks fly, but in the end, the senator and co-hosts largely spoke at cross purposes.
He said suggesting that black professionals and leaders are exceptions to the black experience, not the rule, is “a dangerous, offensive, disgusting message to send to our young people today.”
“The fact is, we’ve had an African American president, an African American vice president, we’ve had two African Americans who were secretaries of state,” Scott said. “In my hometown, the police chief is an African American who is now running for mayor.”
At one point, he defended Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in his fight against Disney, saying that legislation restricting what teachers can say about gender and sexuality in the classroom was “the right issue with regard to our young children and what they are doing “. being indoctrinated with.”
The comment provoked boos from the studio audience. Whoopi Goldberg, another co-host, loudly berated the crowd, saying that spectators at “The View” don’t boo.
The field of candidates for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination includes Mr. Scott and Larry Elder, a black conservative commentator, and two Indian-American immigrant children, Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, and Vivek Ramaswamy, entrepreneur and author.
All four have put personal stories of isolation and struggle at the center of their campaigns, saying that family stories of discrimination and racism are relics of the past and do not reflect a form of prejudice still embedded in American society.
On “The View,” Mr. Scott spoke again of his grandfather, who couldn’t make eye contact with a white pedestrian in his small South Carolina town of Salley and had to step off the sidewalk to let the white man pass.
“The progress in America is palpable,” he said. “It can be measured in generations.”
Such talk fits well with the largely white audience that Republican presidential candidates address in the primary season. But on “The View,” the Liberal hosts protested. Sunny Hostin, a co-host who is Black, said she was an exception in the story of the Black achievement, just like Mr. Scott and the show’s most famous co-host, Whoopi Goldberg.
“When it comes to racial inequality, it persists in five core areas of life in the US: economics, education, health care, criminal justice and housing,” she said. “At nearly every turn, these gains were fought for, threatened, and obliterated, mostly through white violence.”
For Republican candidates, such appearances have several advantages. They can use them to address an audience outside the Republican base, and to say they are willing to step out of the bubble of the primary electorate. They can then amplify the joust for Republican voters, as Donald J. Trump did last month with his CNN town hall and as Mr. Ramaswamy does when he tells the Republican audience that his performance on CNN cost host Don Lemon his job.