Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina opened his presidential candidacy with a narrative of the nation’s bitter, racist previous. It is one which he tells usually, of a grandfather compelled from college within the third grade to choose cotton within the Jim Crow South.

A rival for the Republican nomination, Nikki Haley, speaks of the loneliness and isolation of rising up in small-town South Carolina because the little one of immigrants and a part of the one Indian household round. Larry Elder, a conservative commentator and long-shot presidential candidate, talks to all-white audiences about his father, a Pullman porter within the segregated South, who carried tinned fish and crackers in his pockets “because he never knew whether he’d be able to get a meal.”

Such biographical particulars are helpful reminders of how far the G.O.P.’s candidates of coloration have come to achieve the head of nationwide politics, a run for the presidency. But in bolstering their very own bootstrap biographies with tales of discrimination, they’ve put forth views about race that at occasions seem at odds with their view of the nation — usually denying the existence of a system of racism in America whereas describing conditions that sound identical to it.

“I’m living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not a land of oppression,” Mr. Scott says in a brand new marketing campaign commercial operating in Iowa, although he has spoken of his grandfather’s compelled illiteracy and his personal experiences being pulled over by the police seven occasions in a single yr “for driving a new car.”

The clashing views of the position that race performs in America are a significant theme of the 2024 election, underpinning cultural battles over “wokeness.”

Yet behind the talk over structural racism — a codified program of segregation and subjugation that suppressed minority achievement way back and, many students say, has left individuals of coloration nonetheless struggling — is a secondary debate over the that means of the tales politicians inform about themselves.

That has generally made the dialogue of race on this presidential main awkward but additionally revealing, and has underscored a central distinction between the 2 events. Republican candidates of coloration don’t see their pasts of their current, even when the 2 front-runners within the race for the Republican nomination, Donald J. Trump and Ron DeSantis, are elevating racial grievance to the middle of conservative politics, via overt or covert appeals to white anger.

“I know Nikki and Tim — both are brilliant — but for them not to be able to make the logical jump is troubling: Systemic racism is the issue,” mentioned Bakari Sellers, a Democratic political commentator who served with Mr. Scott and Ms. Haley within the South Carolina legislature. “For them to recount their own experiences but close their eyes to the bigger picture, it’s troubling.”

Mr. Elder, at an April gathering of evangelical Christians in West Des Moines, Iowa, spoke of his father, the Pullman porter who later grew to become a cook dinner in a segregated Marine Corps unit. When he returned from World War II, his father discovered he couldn’t get a job within the whites-only eating places of Chattanooga, Tenn., and struggled to seek out work in Los Angeles as a result of he had no references from Tennessee.

Mr. Elder’s father even requested to cook dinner in Los Angeles eating places without spending a dime, simply to get references, and once more was refused. He ended up with two jobs scrubbing bathrooms.

“There was something called slavery, the K.K.K., Jim Crow — that was codified,” Mr. Elder mentioned in an interview. “Of course there was systemic racism.”

But now?

No, he replied, recalling the election and re-election of a Black president, Barack Obama.

In the early years of the Obama presidency, discuss of a post-racial society — the place the colour of 1’s pores and skin has no bearing on stature or success — was frequent. But later, an upsurge of white supremacist violence, together with the bloodbath of Black parishioners at a Charleston church in 2015 throughout Mr. Obama’s second time period, together with the homicide of George Floyd in 2020, shattered that idealized post-racial notion for many individuals of coloration from all political persuasions.

“That’s part of the problem with Scott and Haley declaring there’s no racism,” mentioned Andra Gillespie, a political scientist at Emory University and the creator of a book on Mr. Obama’s symbolism as a Black president. “You could have argued in 2006 and 2007 that racism was waning. That’s a lot less credible today.”

Candidates of coloration aren’t the one ones who depend on bootstrap biographies to bolster their attraction. Stories of wrestle, impoverished childhoods, working-class roots or ethnic identification are staples for candidates in each events, from Abraham Lincoln to Joseph R. Biden Jr. to Mr. DeSantis and his “family of steelworkers.” But tales of racism and discrimination lend political biographies an added factor of authenticity. Mr. Scott’s household story — “from cotton to Congress” — was the topic of his first campaign ad, unveiled final week.

For Republican candidates of coloration, whose audiences are sometimes virtually completely white, there may be one other issue, in keeping with strategists: Placing racism safely prior to now and trumpeting the racial progress of their very own lifetimes relieves at present’s G.O.P. voters from having to confront any racial animosity of their celebration. That generally is a soothing message to Republicans who really feel defensive in regards to the celebration’s racial make-up and insurance policies.

“They’re saying this to make an overwhelmingly white Republican audience feel better about themselves,” mentioned Stuart Stevens, a former Republican guide who guided the celebration’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. “It’s a variation, oddly enough, of victim politics. People accuse you of being racist? ‘That’s unfair. Vote for me, therefore you’ll prove you’re not racist.’”

Under Mr. Trump, the Republican Party accommodated white nationalists in its ranks and embraced once-taboo concepts like replacement theory.

A Haley marketing campaign spokeswoman, Chaney Denton, mentioned: “In Nikki Haley’s experience, America is not a racist country, and she’s proud to say it. That’s fact, not strategy.” She added that “the only people who seem bothered by that” are “liberal race baiters.”

At an occasion on Wednesday morning sponsored by the news web site Axios, Mr. Scott was pressed to explain racism that he had lately skilled, to which he had a prepared response: being pulled over by cops greater than 20 occasions for “driving while Black,” which he mentioned “weighs heavy on the shoulders.”

“You find yourself in a position where you’ve done nothing wrong, but you are assumed guilty before proven innocent,” Mr. Scott mentioned on Wednesday. But he added, “Racism is embedded in the hearts of individuals.”

Many white Republicans additionally reject the concept America is systemically racist.

At a Haley occasion in February in Iowa, Charles Strange, a retired development employee from North Liberty, Iowa, was extra apt to see systemic points impeding white individuals comparable to himself. “Structural barriers, let’s see,” Mr. Strange mentioned. “Here’s a structural barrier: You got quotas for Blacks for education — a structural barrier for a white person.”

“Of all the threats, there is this national loathing that has taken over our country, where people are saying America is bad or it’s rotten or it’s racist,” Ms. Haley advised an Iowa crowd earlier this yr. “I was the first minority female governor in the country. I am telling you America is not a racist country. It’s a blessed country.”

Many Republican voters and native officers agree.

“I’m not more racist than any Democrat, but they like to label and push that against us,” Gloria Mazza, the Republican chairwoman in Polk County, Iowa, mentioned at a Scott occasion in West Des Moines.

But Black audiences, even Republican ones, are far much less receptive. Such difficulties for the celebration had been on show lately for one more Republican candidate of coloration, the entrepreneur and creator Vivek Ramaswamy.

Mr. Ramaswamy held a town-hall assembly on May 19 on the South Side of Chicago, ostensibly to debate the migrant disaster that has divided the town. He usually talks of his emotions of isolation because the son of Indian immigrants rising up in suburban Cincinnati, however says that the expertise made him stronger, not a sufferer. He has additionally made eliminating affirmative motion a central plank of a candidacy that facilities on a critique of identification politics.

But Black voters made clear they believed strongly that systemic points, previous and current, had been holding them again. The dialogue saved shifting from immigration to reparations for Black Americans, mass incarceration, disinvestment in Black neighborhoods and simply accessible, high-powered weaponry promoted by the firearms business.

“There’s all the money in the world to incarcerate us, and nothing to integrate us back into society,” Tyrone F. Muhammad, founding father of the group Ex-Cons for Community and Social Change, mentioned whereas wanting straight at Mr. Ramaswamy, a fabulously rich investor. Mr. Muhammad added, “There are too many billionaires and millionaires in this country for it to look the way it looks.”

Then Cornel Darden Jr. of the Southland Black Chamber of Commerce & Industry stood to confront Mr. Ramaswamy on affirmative motion. “Those laws have been in place for 70 years,” Dr. Darden mentioned, “and we’re going to defend them.”

After months of telling largely white audiences America will not be a racist society, Mr. Ramaswamy acknowledged bigotry and mentioned race-based preferences had been exacerbating it.

“I do think anti-Black racism is on the rise in America today,” Mr. Ramaswamy mentioned. “I don’t want to throw kerosene on that.”

Maya King contributed reporting.