'Slave owners were the minority': GOP Senate candidate Royce White

A month out from Election Day, Republican Senate candidate Royce White appears to be ramping up his rhetoric to new extremes, including justifications for American chattel slavery.

The 33-year-old Black Catholic is running in Minnesota to unseat three-term Democratic incumbent Amy Klobuchar, a notably bipartisan figure who currently holds a sizable eleven-point lead in the polls. 

White has challenged her from afar with a far-right populist platform built on extremist rhetoric and conspiracy theories, which have played a part in his gaining a large social media following. His latest controversial comments came on the new episode of his “Please Call Me Crazy” podcast, launched in August.

“The slave owners were the minority. Black people weren't the minority; they were the racial minority, but the slave owners were the superminority,” he said in a nearly two-hour recording after the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate between his governor, Tim Walz, and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio.

“What [slave owners[ were fighting for in a sense was to protect the rights of the minority to say, ‘Just because we're the minority doesn't mean that we have to do what everybody else says.’ And that's part of the reason why state and local governments being the level of some of these laws is so important.”

The claims, which he linked to various states’ rights battles in the upcoming general election, are based on some semblance of fact. Though enslaved African Americans were outnumbered by free persons in most Southern states, individual slave owners comprised only about 5% of the overall population in states where slavery was still legal just prior to the Civil War.

Still, White’s comments have been taken as an attempt to justify the institution of American chattel slavery—in which his own Black ancestors were held in bondage. Millions of African Americans died in chains prior to the Civil War, not including many others who did not survive the Middle Passage.

The new controversy is just one of several oddities to emerge in the career of White, whose ascent from a brief professional basketball career to GOP stardom has been swift. He first gained national attention for his protests against the NBA’s perceived lack of concern for mental health issues, when he refused to fly in airplanes due to an anxiety disorder during his time in the NBA from 2012 to 2014.

In 2021, White became a national figure in the political realm after speaking out against the persecution of the Uyghur people in China—another point of disagreement with NBA executives.

Anticommunism and mental health have remained major planks of his political campaigns, including a failed 2022 run for Minnesota’s 5th congressional district seat. He has faced widespread censure for his various other opinions, which have been pegged as misogynistic, antisemitic, and anti-LGBTQ.

In August, White won the Republican primary for the 2024 Senate race in Minnesota, becoming the first Senate candidate born in the 1990s. The Saint Paul native has minimal financial backing from the GOP but has generated support from former President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement. His endorsements include Senate candidate Kari Lake of Arizona, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, and former NBA referee Ken Mauer.

If elected, White would become just the second known Black Catholic to serve in the nation’s upper chamber, after Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois.

This month, Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign unearthed social media posts from White’s House campaign that claimed the “the bad guys”  won World War II, adding that he felt there were no good-faith actors in the conflict.

“If you look closely, you see the link between liberalism and communism in the Allied forces,” he added.

Sen. Klobuchar, White’s November opponent, has remained mum on his inflammatory rhetoric, instead focusing on the campaign trail and her recovery from breast cancer treatment.

Nate Tinner-Williams is co-founder and editor of Black Catholic Messenger.

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