Issac Bailey (@ijbailey) was a columnist for the Sun News in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for 18 years and is author of Proud. Black. Southern. (But I Still Don’t Eat Watermelon in front of White People). He was a 2014 Neiman Fellow at Harvard.

In 2000, I voted for George W. Bush. In South Carolina, where I live, I voted twice for Mark Sanford to become our governor and helped send Lindsey Graham to the U.S. Senate. In fact, I’ve pulled the lever for more Republicans than Democrats. And I’m exactly the kind of voter the GOP needs to survive the demographic changes the country is undergoing: I’m black.

But my days supporting the GOP are over. I won’t be voting for a Republican for high office for quite some time, if ever. And the reasons that I—and others like me—feel this way are likely to spell trouble for a party that got just 6 percent of the black vote in 2012.


In the Obama era, the GOP’s tone and tenure toward African Americans has simply become untenable. Instead of reaching out to voters like me, Republicans are squandering this opportunity by refusing to grapple with the issue of race in a way that resonates with black voters—oftentimes even denying the existence of racial barriers at all. It’s as though the GOP would rather treat us like children who need a stern talking-to by their wiser elders than as a potential voting bloc that can help the party retake the White House.

And, no, Republicans can’t just gain more black voters by supporting or nominating Dr. Ben Carson, whose talk about race sounds more like Ted Nugent than Thurgood Marshall.

I have not always felt this way. There are, or were, plenty of us out there—black voters not loyal to a particular party, making us more gettable for the Republican Party than most. I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 but would have voted against him in 2012 if he wasn’t able to make the Affordable Care Act law. (I thought reforming our broken health care system was that important.) And even though I disagreed with Republicans like Sanford and Graham on a variety of political issues, I thought they were principled men who would place country above party during times of stress.

I have always thought it praiseworthy, too, that the GOP claims the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and it duly received a significant percentage of the black vote through the early 1960s. Even when Republicans cozied up to the likes of Southern senators Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, and grew hostile to the kind of civil rights progress the party had once championed, I was never convinced that black voters should only be Democratic. Some of the party’s deepest commitments—family values, religious faith, fiscal responsibility—resonate strongly with the black community. And the GOP’s embrace of figures like Colin Powell, along with Bush’s diverse Cabinet and strong outreach to African nations, were enough to keep me in the fold. While imperfect when it came to race, Republicans seemed to care about handling that issue with care and sensitivity.

That GOP no longer exists. During the Obama era, the Republican Party has morphed into something I couldn’t feel comfortable being associated with. Conservative opposition to this president has not felt like politics as usual. I’ve watched relative moderates like Graham walk in lock-step with an all-out, seemingly monolithic opposition campaign against Obama and his policies—as our country was fighting two ground wars, the economy was in freefall and millions of people went without basic health care. I don’t know if that hyper level of opposition in a time of national crisis always had to do with race. I do know it showed the depths to which the party would go to hate Obama.

And it’s not just Obama himself. The disrespect the GOP has shown toward the nation’s first black president has felt like a proxy war by Republicans against the rest of black America. The party has denigrated black people who don’t adhere to the Republican insistence that we speak of race only as a relic of the past, despite our daily lived experiences. When Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teenager, was shot and killed in 2012 and Obama commented that his own son would have looked like Martin, I heard from numerous conservatives who said the president was unnecessarily pulling out the race card; it never crossed their minds that he was simply trying to humanize a young black man who had been killed.

In the years since, as black parents were holding their kids a little tighter, fearing that they might be the next ones put in the crosshairs of an unbalanced person—or police officer—who believes black people are threats, the Republican Party only wanted to change the subject. A black man is shot by police for picking up an air rifle in a Wal-Mart? A 12-year-old black boy is shot by police within seconds of their arrival as he plays with a toy gun in a park? A black woman is arrested during a stop for a lane-change violation after she refused to put out a cigarette? Each time, all Republicans wanted to talk about was black-on-black crime and a high black unwed mother rate.

That’s because the party has convinced itself that black people talk about race not because we genuinely want or need equality, but to ensure that we forever remain victims. This doesn’t necessarily mean the Republican Party, writ large, is racist—just that it’s race-hostile and unaware, something harder to overcome than purging the overtly racist members from its ranks.

***

The message conservatives have long sent black people is: Work hard, commit to education, take responsibility for yourself and make wise decisions. Implicit in this is the insulting notion that black people would know nothing about such things if they hadn’t been pointed out by white Republicans (and some black conservatives), and that if black people follow this route, conservatives will at least respect, if not embrace, them.

Then along came the Obamas, the personification of such conservative teachings. The couple used education and hard work to rise above meager beginnings, secure good jobs and do just what Rick Santorum loves to preach—get educated, get married, then have kids.

Still, in the eyes of Republicans, Obama was seen as too uppity and pretentious, not worthy of their respect, no matter his accomplishments. Just a few months into Obama’s presidency, it was clear some Republicans were not comfortable with his occupancy of the Oval Office—and would not afford him a basic level of respect they had afforded even past Democratic presidents. There was South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson, a white Republican, who famously yelled “you lie” as Obama gave an address before Congress about his healthcare reform plan. Then, early in the 2012 election cycle, the GOP embraced Newt Gingrich, who won the South Carolina primary in the heart of the Bible Belt—the same Gingrich whose marital and personal life didn’t meet the standard set by conservatives the way Obama’s had, the same Gingrich who labeled Obama “the food stamp president,” echoing Ronald Reagan’s race-tinged “welfare queen” slur.

Now, there’s Donald Trump, who has been atop Republican polls since early this summer. In many ways, Trump stands for everything the GOP claims to hate. Conservatives say personal responsibility is paramount, but Trump has walked away from billions of dollars of obligations through multiple bankruptcies over the course of his business career. Conservatives brag about the primacy of God and the Christian Bible, but when Trump was asked about his favorite Bible verse recently, he couldn’t, or at least said he didn’t want to, name one.



Some of the same conservatives who are quick to disparage the Obamas for not “loving” America enough are lining up, or at least giving a strong look to, Trump—a man who proudly talks America down, calling it one big loser; that comes on the heels of the Tea Party whining about wanting its supposedly wayward country back. While conservatives praise Trump for such straight talk, they have criticized Obama for talking about areas where America needs to get better, and labeled Michelle Obama anti-American because during the 2008 campaign she expressed the kind of conflicted views about this country that most black Americans—even most Americans—probably have.

Meanwhile, Republicans who say they are passionate about religious freedom and against political correctness were among the first to try to bring down then-Senator Obama because his onetime pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, preached a bombastic form of a “the sins of the father will be visited upon the sons” sermon—the kind of sermon that white conservative preachers deliver frequently, only with a different kind of bombast.

It should not escape notice that Obama had to become the first president in history to call a press conference to release his long-form birth certificate (while also planning the secret SEAL raid that would lead to the death of Osama bin Laden) because of the likes of Trump and countless conservatives who don’t want to believe that Obama is an American at all. Now, the conservatives who have questioned Obama’s legitimacy, his place of birth, since he first ran for president are enthralled by the man who popularized that “birther” smear more than anyone else.

Maybe conservatives have long forgotten that image of Trump demanding the president’s birth certificate. I assure you a large number of black voters haven’t and never will. It was a moment that only reinforced the idea that to be black in this country is to not be fully American until you get the approval of white people, no matter how outrageous their claims about you, no matter how hard you work or what you accomplish. The all-out opposition to Obama and the once-heated fringe rhetoric that became mainstream in conservative circles was bad enough. As it stands, the Republican Party is poised to enthrone the man who forced the nation’s first black president to prove he was indeed American. For me, for many more black voters like me, that’s too much to tolerate.

***

Some will be quick to remind that the man who sits atop the Republican field with Trump, firmly in second place in the GOP primary (even first place in recent state and national polls), is Ben Carson. A black man as studious and hard-working as Obama and as popular among conservatives as Carson surely disproves the notion that the president’s treatment has had anything to do with race. (According to Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch, Obama isn’t the nation’s first “real” black president, but Carson could be.) Tim Scott’s election to the U.S. Senate in my state of South Carolina, these same people say, also undercuts any possibility that the GOP disrespects black people.

Actually, Carson’s and Scott’s ascendance reinforces the point that the party isn’t racist, but race-hostile and unaware; most Republicans aren’t intentionally causing harm based on race, but many ignore the role it still plays in society—a critical distinction Republicans don’t seem to understand.

Carson and Scott are among this latter group. They frequently emphasize the parts of their stories that make anything seem possible in America. Each overcame incredible odds in a world suspicious of their dark skin to achieve great things—Carson as one of the most respected pediatric neurosurgeons in history, Scott as the first black man to be elected to the U.S. Senate from the Deep South since Reconstruction. But black voters did not flock to Scott even during his historic Senate run—he lost the black vote in South Carolina—nor have they warmed to Carson, a man who was known in most black households for his “gifted hands” before he became a conservative star by talking politics at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Why? Neither Scott nor Carson has been willing to take on race as forthrightly as Obama, or even Senator Rand Paul, for that matter. Scott worked behind the scenes earlier this year as Governor Nikki Haley garnered support to remove the Confederate flag from State House grounds in South Carolina, but he, like most Republicans, did little to challenge the flying of that flag before the massacre in Charleston that killed nine black people. And every time I’ve seen him speak, he delivers a powerful, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps autobiographical story that endears him to conservatives—because he never mentions anything that makes them uncomfortable about the pronounced racial problems that continue holding young black people back, some of which are either caused or worsened by policies the GOP embraces or refuses to change. Carson has gone a step beyond that, comparing today’s black voters to slaves on a Democratic plantation who can’t think for themselves, a sentiment we frequently hear in Fox News world and on conservative radio.

Obama, in contrast, has spent years acknowledging the progress and pain of race in this country, and its complexity, on a personal and structural level. Republicans want to turn a blind eye to our remaining racial flaws—unless they are claiming those problems can be solved by black people working harder. That’s precisely what Carson has given the GOP: a black man who is the personification of the nation’s progress but doesn’t much remind the Republicans about the institutionally embedded racial problems that remain. His presence makes it easier for the GOP to continue downplaying the inequalities most African Americans want given more priority.

I get the sense the GOP would have embraced a Colin Powell in 2000—a black man who talks about America more like Obama than Carson or Scott—but not now. The party doesn’t seem to realize that black voters aren’t disparaging the country when they speak about racial complexity and hardship—no more than Martin Luther King Jr. was when he spoke about America defaulting on its “promissory note” to all citizens of all colors. That wasn’t a play for victimhood or a call for “free stuff,” as Jeb Bush seems to believe. That was a cry rooted in hope and a belief that the greatest nation on Earth can, and should be, even greater.

That’s why, even as many conservatives believe the United States is in freefall and clamor to “get their country back”—a common refrain among Tea Partiers and the like—black voters are the most optimistic group in the nation. A poll commissioned by the Atlantic and the Aspen Institute in June found that 80 percent of black Americans believe our country’s best days are ahead, compared to less than half of white Americans. (Latinos are also more upbeat than white people.) The Brookings Institution similarly published a report this fall concluding, “Most optimistic of all poor groups are blacks in poverty. Poor blacks are in fact more optimistic about the future than the sample as a whole.”

It is not a contradiction to be critical of America’s racial shortcomings and be proud of this place, anyway. For all its talk about minority outreach, the GOP’s best political minds can’t seem to grasp that level of racial complexity. And neither, it seems, can the everyday Republican.

Until that changes, the party will continue pushing away voters like me—even if it does so inadvertently and even though, given the unfolding demographic changes in this country, it needs us now more than ever.