In the past 10 years, there has been an increase in the number of conservatives of color in our newsrooms, in our cabinet positions and even on Instagram reels. Candace Owens, Marco Rubio and Kash Patel are perfect examples of this phenomenon. As our greater society embraces diversity, it seems the American Republican Party has done so as well. This seems paradoxical on its face, or at least internally contradictory.
While Republicans from marginalized groups have always existed, and the use of colorblind politics by right-wing pundits is not new, the stardom of these figures within the ranks of the party has brought the diversity of the party to the main stage.
Critics of these figures are well-intentioned, and I myself agree with the vast majority of these critiques, I can’t help but notice the blatant paternalism laced within the attitudes of some of those presenting these arguments. I aim to explain the rise in prominence of conservatives of color within mainstream media and why what many view as a paradox may not be so paradoxical after all.
Conservatives of color tend to support conservative politicians due to the following factors, in conjunction with immigration and visa acceptance standards in the United States.
The vast majority of countries in the Global South inherited capitalist competitive economies, with wealth concentrating in the hands of political and economic elites. These are the conditions most immigrants are shaped by before they ever set foot in the United States. If you grow up in a system where individual hustle, informal trade networks and entrepreneurial survival are what keep a family afloat, you will develop habits and beliefs that reflect that reality. Many religious traditions across the Global South have long operated alongside this culture, blessing commerce and offering moral frameworks entirely compatible with the spirit of capital.
The clearest examples are the trader economies, such as the Gulf countries and the Swahili Coast, in my own case. These were mercantile cultures built on exchange, competition and accumulation long before colonialism arrived and long after it left. That history produced a relationship to markets and individual enterprise that translates naturally into the economic worldview of the American right. It should surprise no one that people keep swimming in that water when they arrive here.
Christianity and Islam have shaped the social and political cultures of the Global South in ways that run parallel to their influence in the West. Opposition to gay marriage, abortion and atheism are not uniquely American conservative positions. They are majority positions across much of Africa, Latin America and Asia. For someone raised in those contexts, the social conservatism of the Republican Party feels familiar.
The specifics vary, but the suspicion of atheism is remarkably consistent across cultures and denominations. In many of these societies, a person without religion is not just doctrinally wrong; they are socially suspect and morally untrustworthy. That same instinct runs deep in the American right, and it is one of the most underappreciated points of connection between conservative immigrants and the Republican base.
There seems to be a very prevalent myth in liberal discourse that patriarchy is somehow a uniquely Western or uniquely white phenomenon, one that people of color are either victims of or have transcended. However, many cultures around the world have been and remain patriarchal societies.
Patriarchal structures are deeply embedded across the Global South, often reinforced by the same religious institutions discussed above. For immigrants and first-generation Americans whose cultural identity is tied to those structures, the Republican Party’s emphasis on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family can feel not only like an imposition, but a homecoming. When conservative commentators speak of “the family,” many conservatives of color are not hearing a dog whistle. They are hearing a genuine reflection of the values they were raised with.
Many immigrants arrive in the United States having already developed fierce national pride for their country of origin, and then rapidly gain one for their adopted home. The immigrant experience of working hard, building something from nothing and earning citizenship or residency can produce a particularly intense form of American patriotism. Ironically, when this immigrant experience is compounded with racism and xenophobia, the patriotic drive can become stronger. For many immigrants and African-Americans, American patriotism functions as a rebellion against white supremacy.
When you have spent your life being told that you do not fully belong, asserting yourself as unambiguously American can feel like an act of defiance. Americanism becomes a kind of armor, and the conservative embrace of nationalism offers people of color a language that the left, with its complicated relationship to patriotism, often cannot match. It can be a way for people of color to say, “Even if you don’t think I’m an American, I know that I am.”
This dynamic also helps explain the attitude toward immigration and undocumented people that exists within some immigrant communities. Distancing yourself from newer or undocumented immigrants is, for some, another way of asserting belonging and affirming their place within their new culture. The Republican Party has proven adept at channeling the need for identity and belonging lying beneath these dynamics. In many ways, they may have been more skillful at wielding identity politics than any Democratic pundit or politician.
So is it a paradox? I don’t think so, not anymore.
The rise of conservatives of color makes perfect sense once you stop viewing it through a framework that assumes all people of color share the same political interests, cultural values or relationship to American institutions. That assumption is itself a form of essentialism, and quite a dangerous one at that.
The critiques of ethnic and minority figures of the right are warranted, especially when they veer into white supremacist rhetoric. But there is a version of that critique that slides into something uglier, a paternalism that treats these individuals as confused, as sellouts, as people who have somehow failed to understand their own interests.
This denies people of color the full complexity of their political subjectivity, and it lets the left avoid asking harder questions about why its own coalition has failed to hold. There is something convenient about the mockery. If you can dismiss a conservative person of color as confused or compromised, you do not have to reckon with the ways progressive politics has repeatedly failed Black, brown and Indigenous communities.
When someone from a deeply capitalist, religious and patriarchal society immigrates to the United States and finds themselves drawn to the party that most closely reflects those values, they are not being tricked. They are being themselves. The more interesting question, the one I hope this article pushes you toward, is not how the right won them over, but how the left lost them.