Tornadoes touch down in Marion, Plainview

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

In a year when the topic seems virtually unavoidable, race has been a major focus of coverage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.



There was the MSNBC panel Monday evening in which Iowa Rep. Steve King 

 whether nonwhites have made any contributions to civilization.
There was the 

 in which Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr., who is black, shouted "Blue lives matter!" and equated the Black Lives Matter movement with anarchy.
There was the viral hashtag 

, inspired by accusations of plagiarism directed at the Republican presidential nominee's wife, whose speech included notable similarities to remarks Michelle Obama gave in 2008. Satirists using the hashtag had Melania Trump saying things like, "I have a dream!" and "Say it loud! I'm black and I'm proud!" drawing attention to the fact that a white woman was being accused of stealing from a black woman.
(On Wednesday, Trump Organization employee Meredith McIver 

 for the remarks, saying Melania Trump "always liked" Michelle Obama and, while preparing her speech, had read passages from the 2008 speech to McIver, who says she wrote them down and later included them in Mrs. Trump's speech.)
All this as the Republican Party faces scrutiny over diversity — or lack of it — in its ranks. The party sent fewer black delegates to this convention than at any point in the past century, 

: 18 black folks out of 2,472 total delegates. Here's more from the 

 on a sense of fatigue expressed by some black Republicans at the convention. Day One, the article notes, was seen by some as a "white national convention lecturing African-Americans about the police and race relations."


" that minority Republicans wrote in response to the overwhelming whiteness of the convention. The letter, addressed to RNC Chairperson Reince Priebus, calls attention to "deficits" in the party's outreach to more diverse communities, and problems those deficits could create for the party. Here's part of the letter:


 about Melania Trump's speech, saying this "apparent plagiarism" shouldn't be written off as a "silly mistake," and that it's important to consider the context in which Michelle Obama's similar words and phrases were originally delivered:


 taken a stage at the RNC. There was also Sajid Tarar, a Pakistani Muslim immigrant who led a prayer for Donald Trump at the close of the second day. In 

, Tarar explains his rationale behind supporting Trump:



On Day Two of the convention, Harmeet Dhillon, a Sikh American woman who formerly chaired the Republican Party of San Francisco, opened the convention day with 

. Her head was covered with a scarf, and she sang the invocation in Punjabi before translating it into English as white audience members bowed their heads.
Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke Jr., a black Democrat, also addressed the mostly white crowd at the convention, saying in his speech that race is a "heated issue" in the United States. He talked about the 

 charged in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, which he called "good news."


"What we witnessed in Ferguson, in Baltimore and Baton Rouge was a collapse of the social order," said Clarke in his speech. "So many of the actions of the Occupy Movement and Black Lives Matter transcends peaceful protest and violates the code of conduct we rely on. I call it anarchy."

 why someone like Clarke — again, technically a Democrat — might get invited to speak at the RNC. He was appointed to his current position by the then-governor of Wisconsin, a Republican. Part of what made Clarke a "kind of Milwaukee attraction," Ross writes, was a sense that he was "one of those elected officials able to draw large crowds, appeal to people across party lines and say things that no white politician, certainly no white Republican would without some kind of blowback in the very politically blue, nearly 1/3 black Milwaukee area."
Ross talked with political scientist Juliet Hooker about this, and here's some of what Hooker had to say:



Meanwhile, Iowa Rep. Steve King's remarks on the MSNBC panel — "I'd ask you to go back through history and figure out where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you're talking about. Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?" — inspired the hashtag 

 to King's remarks with a post titled "Dear Steve King: Here are some things not invented by white people." The list includes everything from mathematics and the seismograph to Pokemon and irrigation, and concludes with this statement:


 on his earlier remarks to Politico, saying he felt one of his co-panelists was "disparaging a group of people" in saying the Republican Party won't be led by "old white people" in the future.


"If you're sitting here as a seated member of Congress on a national television show and asked to swallow something like that and curl up, again, no other group of people would take that," King said. He also elaborated on his remarks about history:


This isn't a complete list of race-related happenings at the RNC, and let us remind you that this is just the beginning of convention season. We still have 

, and the Democratic National Convention hasn't even started yet. With that in mind, we anticipate a sequel to this post in the not-too-distant future. Hit us up at codeswitch@npr.org if you've got anything to add.  Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Politics and Government News

Social Issues

Election 2016

Ericka Cruz Guevarra

Author

A lawmaker asks if non-whites have contributed to civilization. Accusations that a white woman stole remarks from a black woman. An exceedingly tiny number of black delegates. And more from the RNC.

Roundup: The Republican National Convention and race (so far)

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox