Political pandering is an annoyance we have learned to live with, as nearly all who hold public office do this. After all, a politician’s only true responsibility is to win votes, and posing as a cook for the hungry, a doctor for the sick and a bed for the tired is the best way to get people on board with a personal campaign.
But a distinctly grotesque inclination of politicians is to peddle race-based agendas, which diminish all complexities within individuals and boil them down to one thing: a member of a racial or ethnic group.
Since the birth of the U.S., we have watched politicians do just this in countless ways, one being former President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, which forced tens of thousands of Native Americans to relocate west of the Mississippi. According to the U.S. Department of State, white Americans petitioned the government in order to make this happen. This strengthened Jackson’s reputation among his voters, who later gave him a second term.
In the late 1800s, Jim Crow laws were implemented, further enforcing the separation between Black people and white people in the South. These laws were widely supported by white Southerners. The Smithsonian says, “Beginning in the 1890s, southern states enacted literacy tests, poll taxes, elaborate registration systems, and eventually whites-only Democratic Party primaries to exclude black voters.”
In recent years, affirmative action, defined by Cornell Law School as “a set of procedures designed to; eliminate unlawful discrimination among applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future,” has only furthered us down the road of following conniving political strategy and moving farther away from removing government from unnecessary racial issues.
The most obvious example of affirmative action in practice occurred in 2020, when President Joe Biden announced that he would choose a Black woman as his vice president, thereby putting color before qualification. According to Time magazine, Biden went on to say, “I commit that if I’m elected President and I have an opportunity to appoint someone to the courts, I’ll appoint the first black woman to the Court.”
The resulting issue is not the follow-through on Biden’s decision, but the decision in itself. It is impossible to view others purely if you must base decisions and actions on race or ethnicity. By doing so, people — namely minorities in today’s culture — become tools used for personal gain.
Bob Dylan said it best in his Jim-Crow-era song called “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” which illustrates the institutionalized racism of the 1960s South. It tells the story of the murder of Medgar Evers and how he and other African Americans were used, as the song says, “For the politician’s gain … He’s only a pawn in their game.”
We must be wary of politicians who hold race-based agendas, as they will never have the interest of the individual in mind. Instead, they will only remember the supposed interest of a group.
Currently, as two politicians compete for presidency, neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris have chosen to leave these racial agendas behind.
Trump aims to win the approval of African American voters by stating, “I’ve done more for Black Americans than anybody with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln. Nobody has even been close,” according to U.S. News & World Report.
So, too, has Kamala Harris involved herself in unnecessary racial division, calling the Supreme Court’s denial to uphold race-based college admissions a “denial of opportunity,” according to Business Standard. Harris has also expressed an intent to advance affirmative action efforts if she is elected president.
Despite numerous examples of moments when race-based policy hurt citizens of the U.S., along with the reasons it will continue to do so, similar instances of near-sighted policymaking will occur regularly because race is easy to recognize and weaponize. By acting on the majority of voters’ opinions regarding specific minority groups, which Andrew Jackson and Jim Crow lawmakers did, politicians can receive broader support and, in turn, more votes.
Though race-based policy is deeply intertwined in foreign and domestic policy, the U.S. has an opportunity to set an example for the world by electing leaders who do not rely on color-coded appeals for approval. It will, however, require one who is pure in intention, honest in action and willing to represent an unprecedented cause.
Kilker is the opinion editor for the Liberty Champion.