In a piece at The Guardian, black conservative commentator Crystal Wright hits her own party for failing to make good on its promise to reach out to minorities. Nearly a year after GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, Republicans have resorted to subversive tactics in an Illinois congressional race to thwart the election of Erika Harold, a black candidate who dares to challenge a white incumbent.
To keep up appearances, the RNC hired a handful of blacks this year and featured the black Republican house speaker from Oklahoma, TW Shannon, as a speaker in its Rising Stars Program at the RNC's summer meeting in Boston. But when it's time to support actual black candidates in primaries against white candidates, the RNC treats black Republicans like the plague.
Ask black Republican Erika Harold; she can tell you all about it. The former Miss America 2003 and Harvard Law School graduate, Harold had the audacity to challenge white, male, first-term Representative Rodney Davis in a GOP primary for Illinois' 13th congressional seat — and is witnessing the party machine's discrimination up-close and personal.
The Illinois Republican party refused to give Harold access to the GOP data center. Formerly called the "voter vault", the data center is where the RNC stores voting information for all voters in the country, which it makes available to the 50 state parties for free. Candidates are given access to the database to target donors and voters.
Read Crystal Wright's entire piece at The Guardian.
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