From the convention stage here, the Republican Party has tried to highlight its diversity, giving prime speaking slots to Latinos and blacks who have emphasized their party’s economic appeal to all Americans.

But they have delivered those speeches to a convention hall filled overwhelmingly with white faces, an awkward contrast that has been made more uncomfortable this week by a series of racial headaches that have intruded on the party’s efforts to project a new level of inclusiveness.

The tensions come amid a debate within the GOP on how best to lure new voters. The nation’s shifting demographics have caused some Republican leaders to worry not only about the party’s future but about winning in November, particularly in key swing states such as Virginia and Nevada.

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...despite a speaker lineup in Tampa that includes Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love, who would be the party’s first black congresswoman if she won in November, just 2 percent of convention delegates are black.

That’s according to an analysis by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Bositis also said that only two members of the 165-member RNC are black and that none of the leaders of the committees responsible for drafting the GOP platform and adopting the convention rules are black.

“This Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off,” he said.

Read more at The Washington Post.

When Robert C. “Bobby” Scott was elected to Congress in 1992, he was Virginia’s only black representative, chosen by voters in a serpentine district designed to include most of the state’s heavily African American neighborhoods.

Nearly 20 years later, in a rapidly diversifying state, Scott remains Virginia’s only non-white congressman. He still represents a district that stretches from Hampton Roads into Richmond with squiggly boundaries, drawn to maximize black votes.

Is that a problem?

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In the 1970s and 1980s, civil rights leaders pushed to increase the number of African Americans in Congress, said David Bositis, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies and an expert in black representation.

Because voting was so racially polarized, particularly in the south, that meant creating districts with high percentages of black voters, he said.

Read more at The Washington Post.