It feels strange to label a black woman as a racist; but I’ll get to that, and explain it, momentarily.
Kristina Karamo (bio here; photo, left) was elected chair of Michigan’s Republican Party on Saturday, February 19, 2023 (see story here).
This is the first time she’s been elected to anything; she lost elections for county commissioner in 2018 (in a county that’s 77% white) and Michigan secretary of state in 2022 (by a wide margin; see results here).
A graduate of an evangelical college and a pro-Trump election denier, Karamo acquired a high profile among MAGA conservatives by appearing frequently on Fox shows to push “unproven and false claims about Michigan’s voting system.” She refused to concede her 2022 defeat, even though she lost by more than 600,000 votes, and even before the election “asked a judge to require residents of Detroit … to vote in person or obtain their ballots in person at the clerk’s office.”
Michigan as a whole is 74% white and less than 14% black (details here), but Detroit is 77% black (details here). It doesn’t take a math genius to figure out that much of Michigan’s black population is concentrated in Detroit, and the rest of the state is largely white. By singling out Detroit, what Karamo wanted was to require black voters, but not white voters, to vote in person.
This blatant attempt to discriminate against black voters, in order to suppress their votes, was racist. I don’t care what Karamo’s skin color is; since behavior defines racism, a black person can be racist toward other blacks. Karamo’s motivation probably wasn’t racist; it was to gain an advantage by preventing a large bloc of Democratic voters from voting, in order to help Republican candidates, Trump above all. But because it targeted a racial group, it was racist.
The news media and many political observers probably will say the Michigan GOP is headed by an election denier, which is true as far as it goes. Few, if any, will venture to say the state party chair is a racist; it’ll generate less controversy to just call her an election denier and let it go at that. But I prefer to tell the truth, and the whole truth. She isn’t just an election denier; her behavior was racist.
But that’s not all. Kamaro, with a straight face, “accused Democrats of selling off the body parts of babies and engaging in ritual child sacrifice, and has also said that demonic possession is not only real but can be transferred from one person to another via sexual intercourse” (story here). She’s not just racist, she’s also a lunatic.