Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron won his state’s Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday, setting him up to face off against the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Andy Beshear.
Kentucky may soon have its first Black governor, if Cameron is able to best Beshear. And “all” it will have taken to accomplish this feat is several centuries and Cameron’s emergence in the public consciousness as, arguably, one of the most anti-Black public officials in the United States.
Cameron is perhaps best known as the official whose controversial handling of the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020 helped turn him into a celebrity among conservatives. Put another way, his seeming indifference to a Black woman needlessly shot to death by police during a dubious police raid, and his impotence in prosecuting the case, made him a popular right-wing figure.
Then-President Donald Trump called Cameron a “star” over his handling of the Taylor case, and he endorsed Cameron’s primary campaign for governor last year. That case — in which none of the police officers involved was directly charged in Taylor’s death — provided a perfect illustration of his role as a political figure in conservative politics. From my vantage point, he helps soothe white people’s angst-ridden self-consciousness about responsibility they or their ancestors may bear for American racism — particularly, anti-Black racism.
And Cameron has offered us ample evidence of this, such as his 2020 speech at the Republican National Convention in which he framed efforts to remove statues honoring racist historical figures as an “all-out assault on Western civilization.” Or — in a more recent example — his allegiance to Republicans’ racist crusade against critical race theory being taught in schools, which is a thinly veiled assault on discussions of our nation’s racial history.
Cameron has shown himself to be a tool for white conservatives, a willful Black hand they can use to hammer out their oppressive agenda.
Cameron’s primary victory is likely to build on Trump’s stature in the Republican Party as well. Last week, the candidate said he was “honored” to have Trump’s endorsement — even after a New York jury found Trump liable for committing sexual abuse in the 1990s and defaming his victim years later.
On the other hand, Cameron’s leading opponent in the primary, Kelly Craft, was the U.S. ambassador to Canada for a couple of years during the Trump administration. Nonetheless, on Tuesday, Craft touted a late endorsement from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s likely adversary in the GOP’s 2024 presidential primaries.
The endorsement clearly didn’t work.