The 1st VP of Color Was Elected Over 90 Years Ago; He Was a Republican
It’s impossible not to notice that the left has made a cottage industry out of trashing Republicans and conservatives as racists and “angry white guys” while elevating Democrats as the party of racial diversity.
As the Washington Examiner pointed out, “Joe Biden’s pledge to choose a woman as his running mate, and his consideration of several black female officeholders for the role, has spurred considerable chatter about diversity in the nation’s second-highest office.”
The article went on to take note of an inconvenient fact for the left: Even if the presumptive Democratic nominee picks an African-American running mate and the two go on to win in November, she (Biden has committed to choosing a woman) will not be the first person of color to serve as vice president.
Charles Curtis, a Republican, was the first individual “with acknowledged non-European ancestry” to become vice president, the outlet reported.
Serving under Herbert Hoover from 1929 through 1933, Curtis was either one-eighth or three-eighths Native American. (Either way, he boasted a significantly higher amount of Native American DNA than Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is 1/1,024th Cherokee.)
“He’d like to say, ‘I’m three-eighths Caw Indian and 100 percent American,'” University of Kansas historian David Hamilton told the Examiner. “And that Indian heritage was important to him as a Kansas politician.”
It makes sense that a racial minority would want to belong to the Republican Party, since it was the GOP that freed the slaves. Moreover, the first three African-American U.S. senators were all Republicans.
The left will probably acknowledge that every fact mentioned so far is true before reciting the tired talking point about how, beginning in the 1960s, the parties switched their positions on civil rights.
This narrative rests on the assumption that due to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic Party — many of whose members were segregationists — became the party in favor of equality for African-Americans, and the previously abolitionist Republican Party absorbed the segregationists.
Therefore, according to the left, Republicans began winning the southern United States in presidential elections, a region that overwhelmingly supported Democratic candidates in the years prior to the 1960s.
In 2017, then-Vanderbilt University political science professor Dr. Carol Swain put together a video for PragerU busting the myths associated with the “Southern Strategy” and explaining the real reason that the South began voting Republican:
In addition to pointing out how much of the South continued to vote Democratic through the 1990s, 30 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and that only one of the 21 Democratic senators who voted against the legislation became a Republican, Swain explained that the South began voting Republican because “the South itself has changed.”
“The racism that once defined it doesn’t anymore. Its values today are conservative ones: pro-life, pro-gun and pro-small government,” she said.
Since the Republican Party has become the home of conservatism, it only makes sense that Southerners would flock to the pro-life, pro-gun, pro-small government party while rejecting the increasingly pro-abortion, anti-gun, and pro-big government Democrats.
In other words, as Swain proclaimed, “like other regions of the country, the South votes values, not skin color.”
The Democrats resent the fact that the South does not subscribe to their values.
Therefore, as Swain so aptly pointed out, “the myth of the Southern strategy is just the Democrats’ excuse for losing the South and yet another way to smear Republicans with the label ‘racist.'”
Democrats, aided by the media, will most definitely spend every day between now and the 2020 election doing just that. Depending on who Biden chooses as his running mate, they will also try to portray her as a historic pick with the opportunity to become the first “person of color” to serve as VP.
While the Democrats may have the media on their side, Republicans have the facts on their side.
No matter how many times the left says otherwise, the Republicans are not racist, and the first minority vice president was Charles Curtis, a Republican.
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