When It Comes to Race, Vivek Ramaswamy Is No Moral Leader
The Ohio gubernatorial candidate’s political marriage of convenience with MAGA racists lasted until it became inconvenient.
AT TURNING POINT USA’S “AMERICAFEST” CONFERENCE earlier this month, former Republican presidential candidate and current Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy delivered an unusually direct rebuke of racial bigotry. He condemned slurs aimed at Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance, and rejected “heritage American” arguments that treat white ancestry as a prerequisite for national belonging. In a New York Times op-ed published just before the conference (which has since gone viral), Ramaswamy went further, calling on Republicans to disavow groypers and other far-right figures who praise Hitler or attack Jews, immigrants, and people of color.
There is no question that Ramaswamy is right about the principle: American citizenship does not come in tiers, and the rising tide of overt racism in the GOP is something everyone ought to oppose and condemn. But while his sudden insistence that racism has “no place” in American conservatism is welcome, we should be suspicious of any claim that he has experienced some kind of moral awakening. That’s because he spent years minimizing, rationalizing, and politically exploiting the very racial animus he now condemns.
For most of his political rise, Ramaswamy did not merely disagree with progressive approaches to race. He repeatedly argued that racism is not a significant driver of inequality in modern America and that such inequality, particularly affecting black Americans, is best explained by problems at the level of culture and family. He has argued a “crisis of fatherlessness” in black communities is a primary driver of unequal outcomes, which frames our country’s significant, longstanding problems with racial inequality as having more to do with the values and behavior of those most negatively affected than with anything related to policy or our country’s history of outright, legally condoned, and frequently brutal discrimination.
Ramaswamy’s arguments about race were not ones he offered offhand or on the fly. He made them core features of his political brand during his 2024 Republican primary campaign. He celebrated the Supreme Court’s decision ending affirmative action and presented his own biography as evidence that racism is no longer a serious barrier to success. He dismissed DEI as a scam, treated civil-rights language as divisive identity politics, and called Juneteenth a “useless” holiday. In the early stages of the primary, he insisted, “I’m sure the boogeyman white supremacist exists somewhere in America. I’ve just never met him. Never seen one, never met one in my life, right? Maybe I’ll meet a unicorn sooner. And maybe those exist, too.” His message to conservative audiences was consistent and clear: America is already fair, racism is exaggerated, and those who claim otherwise are playing the victim. And that message did much to raise his profile in Trump’s GOP.
At the same time, Ramaswamy was one of the first Republicans in the 2024 primary to advocate ending birthright citizenship—an obviously unconstitutional policy that appealed most powerfully to the furthest-right corners of the party, including many who take seriously the idea of “heritage Americans” today. Ending birthright citizenship would do exactly what he has recently claimed to oppose: It would create a formal hierarchy at birth, classifying some as fully American and entitled to citizenship and classifying others as foreigners who are not entitled to citizenship, all based on whether their parents are citizens—that is to say, it would establish a hierarchy based on heritage.
FOR YEARS, RAMASWAMY DID NOT have to reconcile these contradictions because it was politically useful to him to maintain them. His rhetoric resonated with a Republican electorate eager to hear that racism was largely a myth and that the country’s moral debts had already been paid. He benefited from being a minority voice willing to validate that worldview and offer reassurances rather than a challenge. He could ignore the blatant racial animus within the movement—the role he had given himself would prevent it from reaching him, surely.
Until it didn’t.
Ramaswamy’s rise coincided with a growing willingness among the Republican base to openly call for racial exclusion. On the campaign trail, voters admitted to reporters they were uncomfortable supporting him not because of his policies but because of the color of his skin—or even because they thought he was a Muslim. Far-right figures have gone further, attacking him with unabashedly racist language and rejecting his identity as an American.
And although Trump won Ohio by double-digits last year, Ramaswamy could very well lose the governorship on account of that racist constituency within the GOP. Nick Fuentes intervened directly on Christmas Eve to push for this outcome, saying that the race is the only one he cares about in 2026 and calling for Ramaswamy to lose. It is somewhat less than surprising, then, that Ramaswamy has decided to go on the offensive against that constituency now that the political truce he tried to work out with them has fallen apart. It is hard to miss the irony that while Ramaswamy built his profile smearing civil rights activists and others fighting racism as political opportunists and sellouts, the direct experience of racism has pushed him to center the issue of race in an attempt to save his latest political campaign.
Again, to be maximally clear: It is right for Ramaswamy to repudiate racist bigotry and defend Usha Vance against racist slurs, especially given how few people on the right were immediately willing to do so—including her own husband. JD Vance took weeks to directly address Fuentes’s vulgar attacks on his family, and when he finally did, he said that while they “[piss me] off . . . what pisses me off a million times more” is DEI. It’s hard to imagine that strategy working with the groyper crowd. Fuentes has been going after Vance for years at this point; after Trump selected him as his running mate, the Holocaust-denying white supremacist said of him, “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?”
The attacks from the far right against Usha Vance as well as against Ramaswamy and other right-wing Indian American figures like Dinesh D’Souza are vile—but they are not aberrations. They are the predictable outworkings of a political movement that takes virtually all racism to be either imaginary or inconsequential, a movement Ramaswamy abetted by insisting, for years, that concerns about race were overblown.
What he has not done is reckon honestly with the role he played in normalizing MAGA’s toxic racial politics. Instead, he now frames racism as a fringe pathology introduced by a few bad actors rather than an abiding problem that was worsened by the blithe approach to the issue that he advocated. Moreover, Ramaswamy is apparently only willing to explicitly condemn the racism of controversial figures like Nick Fuentes; he seems unbothered by the racist speech Vance gave while also speaking at AmFest. During his remarks, the vice president ridiculed Minnesota State Senator Omar Fateh, an American-born citizen and son of immigrants—the same type of background Ramaswamy has—as having failed in his bid to become “mayor of Mogadishu—wait, I mean Minneapolis,” a gibe about Fateh’s Somali heritage. Ramaswamy’s unwillingness to stand up for a fellow second-generation immigrant attests to his political cowardice and cynicism.
As an Indian American myself, I will always welcome more voices condemning racism against our community. But a politics such as Ramaswamy’s, which is only willing to advocate racial inclusion when it becomes useful, is not principled or exemplary—it’s opportunistic. Until Ramaswamy reckons with his own role in fostering MAGA racism in America, his sudden profession of clarity on the issue will not come across as moral leadership. It will read as just one more self-serving political play.
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