By Michael Eric Dyson:
“I would be a president for all of the people, African-Americans, the inner cities,” President-elect Trump declared during the second presidential debate. “Devastating what’s happening to our inner cities,” he lamented. “You go into the inner cities and — you see it’s 45 percent poverty. African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities.”
Mr. Trump’s views on black people, poverty and cities were quickly challenged as myopic and ill informed. But the administration he is building is emblematic of his ignorance.
The only African-American member of his designated cabinet is Ben Carson, who was tapped for Housing and Urban Development. Mr. Carson was a beloved American icon, a man who endured a hardscrabble childhood in Detroit to become a famous physician. But his turn to right-wing petulance, with a bow to kooky comparisons of Obamacare to slavery, considerably soiled his reputation. If his story was once emblematic of beating the odds to become a success, he is now a different kind of symbol — of how little Mr. Trump knows, or cares, about African-Americans.
Similarly, his pick of Senator Jeff Sessions as his attorney general — a man who according to testimony before Congress once joked that the only problem with the K.K.K. was the group’s drug use, deemed a white lawyer with black clients a race traitor and dismissed civil rights groups as “un-American” — proves Mr. Trump cares little for the interests of the African-American citizens he will serve in the Oval Office.
During his presidential campaign Mr. Trump tweeted out a grossly inaccurate image from a nonexistent “Crime Statistics Bureau” that suggested that the bulk of white people are killed by black people — a belief that white bigots have long parroted as the reason for their racist revenge.
Mr. Trump argued that “African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.” President Obama drolly declared, “I mean, he missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow.”
Mr. Obama’s retort underscores a troubling truth: Mr. Trump’s vast ignorance of black life leads him to exaggerate the perils confronting black Americans in all the wrong ways. He overlooks the nation’s vicious history of racism to proclaim that this is the worst racial epoch ever. It is a convenient ruse to make the period under President Obama a foil to his heroic rescue of black people through his magical political powers.
The Full Story (December 17, 2016)
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