THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

On the day Tim Scott announced his presidential bid, Politico published a piece titled "55 Things You Need to Know About Tim Scott." By my count, 34 of those "things you need to know" are variations of the same thing: Tim Scott is Black. Among them: His father smoked Kool menthols (fact No. 7); he and his grandfather both liked Black professional wrestlers (No. 9); the senator is a fan of the 1970s funk band Cameo (No. 37) -- and he gets a lot of racist voice mails (No. 39). Yet, of all these Tim-Scott-is-Black facts -- which range from silly to somber -- my favorite is No. 47. It is simply this quote: "People are fixated on my color."

This should be the title of nearly every article that has been written on the South Carolina senator in recent months -- people are deeply and intensely fixated on Scott's skin color. [...]

What starts as mere curiosity often turns into assertions of betrayal. All too often, public criticism of Black conservatives ends up implying that there is a difference -- as Nikole Hannah-Jones of the New York Times once implied in an infamous tweet -- between being "racially Black" and "politically Black." It should not be controversial to say that putting such straitjackets on permissible Black political sentiment is racist.

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