Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina opened his presidential candidacy with a story of the nation’s bitter, racist past.
It is one that he tells often, of a grandfather forced from school in the third grade to pick cotton in the Jim Crow South.
A rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, speaks of the loneliness and isolation of growing up in small-town South Carolina as the child of immigrants and part of the only Indian family around.
But in bolstering their own bootstrap biographies with stories of discrimination, they have put forth views about race that at times appear at odds with their view of the country — often denying the existence of a system of racism in America while describing situations that sound just like it.
“I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” Mr. Scott says in a new campaign advertisement running in Iowa, though he has spoken of his grandfather’s forced illiteracy and his own experiences being pulled over by the police seven times in one year “for driving a new car.”
Persons:
Tim Scott of, Jim Crow, Nikki Haley, Larry Elder, he’d, ’, Mr, Scott
Organizations:
Tim Scott of South Carolina, Republican
Locations:
Tim Scott of South, South Carolina, Pullman, America, Iowa