Whitley Yates is the director of diversity and engagement for the Indiana GOP. As a young, black woman in a mostly older, white party, she's faced serious challenges in trying to convince the party that it needs to broaden its outreach when it already has an electoral stranglehold over Indiana. We talked about how her work is going, how uniformly white rooms full of state Republicans have responded to her diversity seminars, and what it was like for her to witness the events of the past few months, as large numbers of Republicans, including some in her own state, attempted to disenfranchise Black and other minority voters across the country.
