A month earlier, he said on Fox News that “woke supremacy is as bad as white supremacy,” a kind of equivalence that could be dismissed as political pandering had Scott not been a friend of the late Reverend Clementa Pinckney, the South Carolina state senator and pastor who was gunned down in the Emanuel A.M.E. This was a stunning display of cynicism, even by the standards of the current G.O.P., yet this was not the first time that Scott’s race had been utilized so disingenuously. “America,” he said, “is not a racist country.” voter-suppression bills that have swept the nation in the wake of Donald Trump’s defeat, and stated his case plainly. In the midst of a fairly straightforward conservative critique of Biden’s policies and priorities, the senator detoured into a complaint about liberals who he said had called him racial epithets-he graciously declined to call them “the real racists”-and claimed that progressives are intent on teaching people that, “if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.” He defended the G.O.P. Late last month, when Senator Tim Scott, of South Carolina, delivered the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s first major address to a joint session of Congress, the subtext could scarcely have been closer to the surface: the sole Black Republican in the Senate was speaking on behalf of a Party that, under the increasing influence of the far right, has embraced a brand of belligerent and overt racism that was naïvely thought to have been banished from American politics.

Nikole hannah jones on the 1619 project