Conservatives are currently embroiled in an acrimonious fight between Republicans of color and racists embedded within the far-right movement.

Take the Republican gubernatorial primary in Florida, which is getting meaner by the minute. Rep. Byron Donalds, who has received the president’s endorsement, is encountering fierce levels of hostility from fellow nominees desperate to promote and distinguish themselves. That includes rival Republican candidate James Fishback referring to Donalds as a “slave” to corporate interests and tech bros.

Fishback argued Donalds had “no right to complain” and shouldn’t be upset by such racially charged comments because his ancestors were not subjected to slavery in America.

Fishback’s quote invoked themes popularized by Black conservatives in the “American Descendants of Slaves” movement, who’ve sought to drive a wedge among Black people by differentiating those with recent immigrant histories from those without such histories.

Donalds is one of just a few Black Republicans in Congress, and he’s often taken great pains to minimize racism in American society. Last year, he disingenuously diminished and whitewashed the Jim Crow era as a period “where Black families were fully intact” and voted conservatively. Mind you, this was an era where most Black people were deprived of the right to vote and were legally discriminated against, lynched, forced to endure oppressive sharecropping systems in the South, and subjected to numerous indignities, injustices, and impositions.

Donalds isn’t the only conservative of color facing augmented resistance from the conservative right. At Turning Point USA’s flagship event late last month, Republican Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy denounced racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and xenophobia deeply festering within the MAGA movement and the larger conservative right. Ramaswamy condemned the notion of “Heritage Americans,” the nationalist belief those with Anglo-Protestant ancestry are more American than the children of recent immigrants.

Ramaswamy’s attacks on the more rabid forces infecting the MAGA movement appear to be a massive 180-degree turn from how he addressed duplicative bigotry during his less-than-stellar 2024 presidential campaign.

He further agreed with the philosophy tracism is “emergent in certain corridors of the online right.” But Ramaswamy was deafeningly silent when Trump attacked Haitian immigrants and Venezuelan refugees. In fact, during his dismal presidential campaign, Ramaswamy adamantly vouched for draconian immigration policies, among them the deportation of American-born children of undocumented immigrants. While he has made some miniature overtures, such as denouncing far-right activist and white supremacist Nick Fuentes (hardly demonstrates any significant degree of courage), the reality is Ramaswamy is either reluctant or refuses to take a full-throttle stance and call out racism for what it really is.

Then there’s Rob Smith, a Black and gay Republican influencer who adopted a “hear no evil, fear no evil, see no evil” stance and attacked fellow Black people whenever he had the opportunity to do so. Smith was heckled and verbally pelted with racist, homophobic slurs while attending a Republicans for National Renewal (a conservative advocacy and MAGA group) event.

He said the group hurled racist and homophobic slurs at him, and he told CNN he was a victim of a hate crime. Smith shared a video on social media in December showing him at an event in Phoenix as he commented being “confronted and surrounded by White Supremacists that don’t like gays or blacks in the Republican Party.” He recounted the experience resulted in his feeling “exposed” and that he had no intention of attending similar events in the future.

The harrowing incident prompted him to leave the Republican Party, declaring he was “betrayed” by MAGA and saw what the movement really thought of him. Though it’s hard to believe Smith was really that racially naïve.

The major issue with many non-white conservatives, in addition to their intellectual dishonesty, is their frantic attempt to convince white people who are indisputably racially bigoted that they are not racist. This is not to say all Black or other non-white conservatives demonize other Black people for profit. Republican strategist Raynard Jackson, journalist Tony Brown, and the late Colin Powell are examples of individuals on the political right who had no problem calling out what they saw as the shortcomings of the conservative movement regarding race.

Racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, and other social ills do indeed exist in America and in all nations. Most honest Americans know this, regardless of their race or ethnic backgrounds. There is far too much concrete evidence to indicate otherwise.

The blood and soil politics and rhetoric that has seized the current conservative right is morally sinister, draconian, degenerate and  morally abominable. Deep down, despite adamant denials, these non-white conservatives know this to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

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Copyright 2026 Elwood Watson, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate

Elwood Watson is a professor of history, Black studies, and gender and sexuality studies at East Tennessee State University. He is also an author and public speaker.