Mike Hill, a Black Republican state representative in Florida, grew steadily more disheartened as he watched television clips of his party’s overwhelmingly White national convention lecturing African-Americans about the police and race relations.
There was Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, nearly shouting Monday night that the police only wanted to help people, regardless of race. A sea of White convention delegates, cheering wildly as two Black speakers ridiculed the Black Lives Matter movement and unconditionally praised law enforcement officers. And a series of speakers pushing Donald J. Trump’s law-and-order message and arguing, as he has, that the United States had lost its way.
“When a lot of White Republicans get together and bring up race, even telling Black people how they should see police and the world, it evokes the worst kind of emotion,” said Mr. Hill, who supports Mr. Trump but decided to skip the convention. “We have so few Black Republicans to begin with. Talking about race won’t bring us more.”
For many Black Republicans, the party’s convention has veered unexpectedly and unhappily toward lecturing and moralizing on issues of race, an off-putting posture at a time when Mr. Trump is staggeringly unpopular with minority voters. He drew support from zero percent of African-Americans in recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and he is struggling badly with Hispanics, partly because of his harsh language about Mexicans and immigrants.
These Republicans said they had preferred the political messages to Black voters at recent conventions, where the focus was less on public safety and crime than on economic opportunity, job creation, support for small businesses and school choice — all issues, they said, that held appeal.
In Cleveland, however, Mr. Trump and Republican Party leaders are focused on appealing to White voters, particularly White men who are critical to their electoral strategy in the Midwest and the South.
Black Republicans said they understood the thinking behind this.
“When the Republican is getting only 5 or 6% of the Black vote anyway, and the Democrat simply needs to say ‘I’m on your side’ to win the Black vote, then what option do you have?” said Ward Connerly, a former regent at the University of California and a leader in national efforts to end affirmative action in college admissions. “You support law and order. That will bring out a certain amount of support for a lot of Americans who are afraid because they see society as crumbling.”
Black Republicans who spoke from the podium seemed focused more on castigating Black protesters, scolding other Blacks for their behavior and exalting Mr. Trump than on trying to help Republicans make inroads with undecided or skeptical Black voters.
“Somebody with a nice tan needs to say this: All lives matter!” declared Darryl Glenn, a commissioner of El Paso County, Colo., who is African-American, in a line that drew a thunderous ovation from delegates.
Mr. Glenn repeatedly struck a moralizing tone. “If we really want to heal our communities, more men need to start stepping up and taking care of their children,” he said at one point. “Safe neighborhoods happen when fathers and mothers are in the home,” he said at another.
This convention has fewer Black delegates and speakers than any in two decades, according to several African-American Republicans who are regulars at party gatherings. The Republican National Committee could not provide definitive counts of delegates by race; one party official estimated that there were 80 Black delegates, but that was based on an informal crowd count that might have included people on the convention floor who were not delegates. There are 2,472 delegates in all.
Fred Brown, the chairman of the National Black Republican Council, said he had been going to Republican conventions since the 1970s and believed that this year’s convention was one of the Whitest in memory.
Another moment that unnerved some Republicans came when David Clarke Jr., the sheriff of Milwaukee County, declared that “blue lives matter” and argued that the Black Lives Matter movement was contributing to “a collapse of social order.” He also praised the acquittal of one of the Baltimore police officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray.
“How we talk directly about a community of people, and how we talk indirectly about a community of people, matters,” said Michael Steele, who was the first Black chairman of the Republican National Committee. “Rudy’s not living in their neighborhoods. And he doesn’t understand what’s motivating them.”
