“Completely Racist”: Edwidge Danticat on Trump’s “Shithole Countries” Remark Targeting Africa, Haiti

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

International condemnation of Donald Trump is growing, after reports the president used an expletive during a meeting about immigrants from Africa, Haiti and El Salvador. While meeting with lawmakers, Trump reportedly said, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re s—hole countries … We should have more people from Norway.” Trump also reportedly said, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out.”

Earlier this morning, Trump wrote on twitter, quote, “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made–a big setback for DACA!”
 
Trump’s remarks come weeks after The New York Times reported Trump had also disparaged Haitians and Nigerians during a closed-door meeting in June, saying Nigerians would never, quote, “go back to their huts” if they came to the U.S. As for Haitians, Trump said, quote, they “all have AIDS.”

Trump’s latest remarks come just after his administration announced it’s ending temporary protected status for up to 250,000 Salvadorans who have been living in U.S. since at least 2001. Last year, the Trump administration announced it also is ending temporary protected status for tens of thousands of Haitians, Nicaraguans and Sudanese immigrants living in the U.S.

Trump’s s—hole remarks Thursday have been condemned across the globe. That’s s—hole. We’re not using the actual expletive that he used, four letters before the word “hole.” United Nations high commissioner for human rights [spokesperson] Rupert Colville decried Trump’s remarks.

RUPERT COLVILLE: These are shocking and shameful comments from the president of the United States. I’m sorry, but there’s no other word one can use but “racist.” You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as [bleep], whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome. … The positive comment on Norway makes the underlying sentiment very clear. And like the earlier comments made vilifying Mexicans and Muslims, the policy proposals targeting entire groups on grounds of nationality or religion, and the reluctance to clearly condemn the anti-Semitic and racist actions of the white supremacists in Charlottesville, all of these go against the universal values the world has been striving so hard to establish since World War II and the Holocaust.

AMY GOODMAN: In South Africa, Jessie Duarte of the African National Congress also criticized Trump.

JESSIE DUARTE: Ours is not a [bleep] country. Neither is Haiti or any other country in distress. Obviously, we are in no position to stop any president from saying anything they wish to say. But all we can say is that developing countries do have difficulties. Those difficulties are not small matters. And it’s not as if the United States doesn’t have difficulties. There are millions of unemployed people in the U.S., millions of people who don’t have healthcare services or access to education. And we would not deign to make comments as derogatory as that about any country that has any kind of social, economic or other difficulties.

AMY GOODMAN: And in Haiti, longtime activist René Civil said Trump should be reminded of Haiti’s history.
 

RENÉ CIVIL: [translated] In the name of the Haitian people, we are part of a patriotic emergency that is fighting for real change in Haiti. We demand that Donald Trump apologize before the entire continent, as well as before Haiti, the country whose blood has been used by ancestors who have served with their minds and bodies to liberate the United States itself from slavery. … Haiti is not a [bleep]. It’s a great country. It’s the mother of liberty.

AMY GOODMAN: Trump’s remarks prompted his hometown paper, the New York Daily News, to publish on its cover an illustration featuring Trump’s likeness superimposed over a cartoonish “poop” emoji, with the headline “S— FOR BRAINS: Trump spews vicious slur against immigrants.”
We go now to Florida, where we’re joined by the acclaimed Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat. She is a novelist, speaking to us from Orlando, Florida, author of a number of books, including The Farming of Bones, which won an American Book Award. She was born in Haiti, came to the United States when she was 12. We are speaking today to Edwidge, and on this day after Trump’s s—hole comments, on the eighth anniversary of the devastating Haitian earthquake that killed as many as 300,000 people.

Edwidge Danticat, welcome to Democracy Now! Your response to President Trump?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, thank you, Amy. My response to President Trump is total condemnation. It was a very racist remark, which shed light on earlier decisions that he had—that have been made by the administration—for example, about temporary protected status being eliminated for Haitians and Salvadorans, and his remark, as reported by The New York Times, about all Haitians having AIDS. It seems like, once again, Haiti is being used as a foil, and he is baiting his bait and feeding them—Haiti as red meat.

And it’s extremely sad that it happened also in the shadow of this day. Today was going to be an extraordinarily sad day for many of us, anyway, who lost our family members, who lost our friends, in the devastating earthquake. So this is even more salt on our wounds. Not surprising, because of the nature of this presidency and the way this president conducts himself, but it is a terrible slight. It’s completely racist, especially the way that he paralleled Haiti and Africa, which is a continent, not a country—someone should tell him—and describing them in this manner and contrasting them to Norway.

AMY GOODMAN: Seems to be redefining the term “White House,” where he lives, in Washington, and what he wants to see in this country. Edwidge Danticat, we have been playing the responses of people around the world, from South Africa, one of those, as Donald Trump calls them, s—hole, but he uses the full expletive, though, inexplicably, this morning he’s kind of denying this in a tweet, though yesterday, when the White House was asked about this, they did not deny that he said this. I mean, there were so many congressmembers in the room. What does it mean for Haitian-American families, both the policy, what you’re facing, the loss of—what so many communities are facing, Haitian communities and Salvadoran, the loss of TPS, but also for your kids, when people hear these terms?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Well, that’s exactly where I was going to go. Now there are so many Haitian children who will be going to school today, and inevitably it will come up. And then they will have to—their parents, who are going to have to explain to the children why they don’t—you know, what the president has said and what kind of country they actually come from, and a country that—like Haiti, that has had difficulties, but that also the U.S. has played a hand in creating certain types of situations that has led, you know, to the level of poverty that we have, which doesn’t mean that we are not human beings, that we don’t have dreams, that we’re not trying very hard to keep our country going. So, it’s very disparaging.

AMY GOODMAN: Edwidge Danticat, what would you say if you were meeting with President Trump today at the White House?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: I don’t think I would be meeting with President Trump, but I would use this opportunity that you have given me to tell him to just stop it. Stop it. I mean, he’s spewing white supremacist views that have real consequences in the lives of ordinary people. We already see it online, people who are jumping in and saying, “Of course what he’s saying is true.” And then there are people who will act on it, when they meet people like us. They will—who will exercise certain prejudices that affect the lives of the people he is talking about. But that also can lead to actual violence against our bodies, against our children. So I think he needs to realize that what he’s saying, from the biggest bully pulpit in the whole world, is affecting individual people. I don’t know that he cares, because I think he’s just spewing these things, and I think, in part, this was also—you know, this is what he believes.

But what he’s saying, from this very high position of power, affects the future of nations, affects the lives of individuals, affects how people—how policy is created. And now you have all these white supremacists and racists who feel so empowered, because, basically, the president of the United States has put them on—you know, has put a target on the backs of these people who he has described in this way, for them to be ridiculed, for them to be geared to have prejudices exercised against them and, in some cases, to have violence and, you know, assaults possible on their bodies, because these words are very—these words give permission to certain kinds of people. And we become then hypervisible in our vulnerability, because we have been singled out, not once—once in the policy with the TPS, once with the AIDS, and now with this, and as a group of people, as Haitians, and as people, he was saying, from Africa. And he’s singling out people for and making us targets for all kinds of possible attacks. And—

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, Edwidge, on this anniversary, this eighth anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti, that killed up to 300,000 Haitians?

EDWIDGE DANTICAT: Yes. Well, today—this is what we would have been doing today, would be remembering and thinking about our dead and commemorating these losses. But sadly, this has been muddled by this vicious attack by the president against our people at this time. So, it is important. We are still going to remember. We are still going to mourn. But to use a saying that many people of different backgrounds have been saying since the election of the president, “Today, we mourn. Tomorrow, we fight.”

AMY GOODMAN: Edwidge Danticat, we want to thank you for being with us, Haitian-American novelist, speaking to us from Florida, author of a number of books, including The Farming of Bones, which won an American Book Award.

Thousands Protest in AZ as Trump Threatens Govt Shutdown over Border Wall & Defends C’ville Remarks

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Phoenix, Arizona, where President Trump held a rally where he repeatedly defended his response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also criticized Arizona’s two Republican senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, without directly mentioning their names. Neither were there, nor was the governor.
While Trump spoke, thousands of protesters gathered outside the Phoenix convention Center. Police attacked the thousands of protesters with tear gas and pepper balls. There are also some reports that police fired rubber coated steel bullets at the protesters. Police reported four people were arrested. During his speech, Trump repeatedly criticized the corporate media.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: These are truly dishonest people. And not all of them. Not all of them. You have some very good reporters. You have some very fair journalists. But for the most part, honestly, these are really, really dishonest people. And they are bad people. And I really think they don’t like our country. I really believe that. And I don’t believe they’re going to change, and that is why I do this. If they would change, I would never say it. The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself and the fake news.

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump attacked the media for about 20 minutes of his speech. During that speech, he also defended former CNN analyst Jeffrey Lord, a Trump backer, who was fired for tweeting a Nazi victory salute.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: You wonder why CNN is doing relatively poorly in the ratings? Because they’re putting like seven people, all negative on Trump, and they fired Jeffrey Lord. Poor Jeffrey. Jeffrey Lord. I guess he was getting a little bit fed up and he was probably fighting back a little too hard. They said, "we better get out of here. We get him out."

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also criticized what he described as "weak weak people" who have allowed Confederate statues to be removed in recent weeks.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: From George Washington — please, don’t take his statue down, please. Please. Does anybody want George Washington’s statue? No? Is that sad? Is that all sad? To Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt, I see they want to take Teddy Roosevelt’s down, too. They’re trying to figure out why. They don’t know. They’re trying to take away our culture. They’re trying to take away our history.

AMY GOODMAN: While thousands of protesters rallied outside the Phoenix Convention Center, Trump openly dismissed his critics.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: All week they’re talking about the massive crowds that are going to be outside. Where are they? Well, it’s hot out. It is hot. I think it’s too warm. They show up in the helmets and the black masks and they’ve got clubs and they’ve got everything. Antifa!

AMY GOODMAN: President Trump also threatened a government shutdown if he didn’t get Congressional approval to build a wall on the Southern border.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: We are cracking down on these sanctuary cities that shield criminal aliens. Finally. And we are building a wall on the southern border, which is absolutely necessary. Build that wall. Now, the obstructionist Democrats would like us to do it. But, believe me, if we have to close down our government, we’re building that wall.

AMY GOODMAN: Ahead of his speech in Phoenix, there was much speculation Trump would pardon Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who’s been convicted of contempt of court for defying a court order to stop his deputies from racially profiling people, then detaining them on suspicion of being undocumented. Last night, Trump hinted a pardon would be coming soon.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: By the way, I’m just curious. Do the people in this room like Sheriff Joe?

CROWD: [cheers]

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: So was Sheriff Joe convicted for doing his job? That’s what —

CROWD: Yeah.

PRES. DONALD TRUMP: He should have had a jury. But, you know what? I’ll make a prediction. I think he’s going to be just fine, OK? But, but, but, I won’t do it tonight because I don’t want to cause any controversy. Is that OK? All right? But, Sheriff Joe can feel good.

Donald Trump Has Been a Racist All His Life — And He Isn’t Going to Change After Charlottesville

By Mehdi Hasan

“Racism is evil,” declared Donald Trump on Monday, “and those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

OK, “declared” may be too strong a word for what we heard from the president. “Stated” is perhaps a better descriptor. “Read out” might be the most accurate of all. Trump made these “additional remarks” with great reluctance and only after two days of intense criticism from both the media and senior Republicans over his original remarks blaming “many sides” for the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. The words were not his own: they were scripted by aides and delivered with the assistance of a teleprompter. The president reserved his personal, off-the-cuff ire on Monday for the black CEO of Merck, not for the white fascists of Virginia.

Much of the frenzied media coverage of what CNN dubbed “48 hours of turmoil for the Trump White House” has overlooked one rather crucial point: Trump doesn’t like being forced to denounce racism for the very simple reason that he himself is, and always has been, a racist.
Consider the first time the president’s name appeared on the front page of the New York Times, more than 40 years ago. “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City,” read the headline of the A1 piece on Oct. 16, 1973, which pointed out how Richard Nixon’s Department of Justice had sued the Trump family’s real estate company in federal court over alleged violations of the Fair Housing Act.

“The government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,’” the Times revealed. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.” (Trump later settled with the government without accepting responsibility.)

Over the next four decades, Trump burnished his reputation as a bigot: he was accused of ordering “all the black [employees] off the floor” of his Atlantic City casinos during his visits; claimed “laziness is a trait in blacks” and “not anything they can control”; requested Jews “in yarmulkes” replace his black accountants; told Bryan Gumbel that “a well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market”; demanded the death penalty for a group of black and Latino teenagers accused of raping a jogger in Central Park (and, despite their later exoneration with the use of DNA evidence, has continued to insist they are guilty); suggested a Native American tribe “don’t look like Indians to me”; mocked Chinese and Japanese trade negotiators by doing an impression of them in broken English; described undocumented Mexican immigrants as “rapists”; compared Syrian refugees to “snakes”; defended two supporters who assaulted a homeless Latino man as “very passionate” people “who love this country”; pledged to ban a quarter of humanity from entering the United States; proposed a database to track American Muslims that he himself refused to distinguish from the Nazi registration of German Jews; implied Jewish donors “want to control” politicians and are all sly negotiators; heaped praise on the “amazing reputation” of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has blamed America’s problems on a “Jewish mafia”; referred to a black supporter at a campaign rally as “my African-American”; suggested the grieving Muslim mother of a slain U.S. army officer “maybe … wasn’t allowed” to speak in public about her son; accused an American-born Hispanic judge of being “a Mexican”; retweeted anti-Semitic and anti-black memes, white supremacists, and even a quote from Benito Mussolini; kept a book of Hitler’s collected speeches next to his bed; declined to condemn both David Duke and the Ku Klux Klan; and spent five years leading a “birther” movement that was bent on smearing and delegitimizing the first black president of the United States, who Trump also accused of being the founder of ISIS.

Oh and remember: we knew all of this before he was elected president of the United States of America. He was elected in spite of all this (yet another reminder that “not all Trump supporters are racist, but all of them decided that racism isn’t a deal-breaker”).

Some had hoped that Trump would be moderated by office; there was much talk of a presidential pivot. It was all utter nonsense and wishful thinking from lazy commentators who have found it difficult to cover, and call out, a president who regularly traffics in racially charged rhetoric while surrounding himself with an array of race-baiting advisers.

 Since entering the Oval Office, Trump has appointed Steve Bannon — former executive chairman of Breitbart News, which has stories tagged ‘Black Crime’ — as his White House chief strategist, and Jeff Sessions — who was once accused of calling a black official in Alabama a “nigger” — as his attorney general; he has claimed, without a shred of evidence, that millions of immigrants “voted illegally” for Hillary Clinton; and, perhaps most shocking of all, he has publicly and repeatedly belittled Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has claimed Native American heritage, as “Pocahontas.”

This is Racism 101 from a sitting U.S. president. And it is the stark and undeniable truth, and key context, that is missing from much of the coverage of the political fallout from Charlottesville. Journalists, opinion formers, members of Congress, and members of the public continue to treat Trump as they would any previous president — they expect their head of government to come out and condemn racism with passion, vigor, speed, and sincerity. But what do you do if the president is himself a long-standing purveyor of racism and xenophobia? What then? Do you still demand he condemn and castigate what is essentially his base? Do you continue to feign shock and outrage over his lack of shock and outrage?

Yes, the U.S. has had plenty of presidents in recent decades who have dog-whistled to racists and bigots, and even incited hate against minorities — think Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Reagan and his “welfare queens,” George H.W. Bush and the Willie Horton ad, and the Clintons and their “super-predators” — but there has never been a modern president so personally steeped in racist prejudices, so unashamed to make bigoted remarks in public and with such a long and well-documented record of racial discrimination.

So can we stop playing this game where journalists demand Trump condemns people he agrees with and Trump then pretends to condemn them in the mildest of terms? I hate to say this, but it is worth paying attention to the leader of the Virginia KKK, who told a reporter in August 2016: “The reason a lot of Klan members like Donald Trump is because a lot of what he believes, we believe in.”

So can we stop pretending that Trump isn’t Trump? That the presidency has changed him, or will change him? It hasn’t and it won’t. There will be no reset; no reboot; no pivot. This president may now be going through the motions of (belatedly) denouncing racism, with his scripted statements and vacuous tweets. But here’s the thing: why would you expect a lifelong racist to want to condemn or crack down on other racists? Why assume a person whose entire life and career has been defined by racially motivated prejudice and racial discrimination, by hostility toward immigrants, foreigners, and minorities, would suddenly be concerned by the rise of prejudice and discrimination on his watch? It is pure fantasy for politicians and pundits to suppose that Trump will ever think or behave as anything other than the bigot he has always been — and, in more recent years, as an apologist for other bigots, too.

We would do well to heed the words of those who have spent decades studying this bizarre president. “Donald is a 70-year-old man,” Trump biographer David Cay Johnston reminded me in the run-up to his inauguration in January. “I’m 67. I’m not going to change and neither is Donald.”

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Trump’s Inconvenient Racial Truth

By NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES
 Source: The New York Times

With the race for the presidency entering its last days, Donald J. Trump last Wednesday once again made his pitch to black America: a new deal aimed just at them. “I will be your greatest champion,” Trump said at a campaign rally in the battleground state of North Carolina. “I will never ever take the African-American community for granted. Never, ever.”

The hyperbolic remarks elicited the same collective eye roll among black Americans and white progressives that they have since Trump began regularly including black Americans in his platform in August. It was then, following days of unrest in Milwaukee after the police killed a black man there, that Trump flew to Wisconsin to give a speech on race. He headed not to the heavily black city where the embers of outrage still smoldered but instead, as his critics noted with glee, took the stage at the county fairgrounds of a bleached-out, deeply conservative Milwaukee suburb in order to address the problems of the “inner city.”

There was, of course, the usual and expected “law and order” and pro-police rhetoric that elicited hoots and cheers from the crowd. But then Trump, as he is known to do, added an unexpected twist.

“Our job is to make life more comfortable for the African-American parent who wants their kids to be able to safely walk the streets,’’ Trump said. ‘‘Or the senior citizen waiting for a bus, or the young child walking home from school. For every one violent protester, there are a hundred of moms and dads and kids on the same city block who just want to be able to sleep safely at night.”

He pointed out the high unemployment rate among black men in Milwaukee, the number of households run by single mothers who were living in poverty and the low high-school-graduation rates. “I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today who wants a different and much better future,” Trump told the crowd, which at times stood eerily silent. “It is time for our society to address some honest and very, very difficult truths. The Democratic Party has failed and betrayed the African-American community.” Trump went on to say that Hillary Clinton “panders and talks down to communities of color,” “seeing them only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” It was time, Trump proclaimed, that Democrats compete for black votes.

There was something utterly surreal about that moment. Trump had spent months whipping up his supporters, focusing on other so-called minority groups whom he labeled rapists and terrorists, and now he was telling the nearly all-white crowd that if they voted for him, he’d use his power to help black residents in the inner cities by bringing jobs back and improving their wages. Trump’s message did not seem to be directed at his audience (recent research by professors at the universities of Chicago and Minnesota showed that white Trump supporters are less likely to support government programs if they think they will help black people). As one resident of West Bend, the approximately 1-percent-black town where the rally was held, put it to The Times: “They think we owe them something. I don’t want to seem racist or anything, but the black heritage has been raised in a certain way that there’s no incentive to get out and work, because all of a sudden you have five kids and there are no dads around.” Nor was it directed to black people, who of all the nonwhite voters are the least poachable by the G.O.P. The message was presumably targeted at white moderates, the independents and disillusioned Bernie Sanders legions, whom Trump was most likely hoping to reassure that he was not racist despite his years of fueling the birther conspiracy theory and months of spewing bigotry about Muslims and Mexicans.

But in his speeches, Trump was speaking more directly about the particular struggles of working-class black Americans and describing how the government should help them more than any presidential candidate in years. Let that uncomfortable truth sink in.

Whatever his motives, Trump was talking about the black working class in a way that few national politicians do. By now it’s no surprise that when they talk about black Americans as at all, Republican politicians typically conflate blackness with poverty, and then quickly blame black people for their struggles. In March 2014, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said that the problems in the “inner cities” Trump was talking about were rooted not in the loss of manufacturing jobs and the flight of businesses and the tax base to government-subsidized suburbs, but on an absence of a “culture of work.”

Liberals quickly lambasted Ryan for those remarks. But far too often, the way Democrats talk to, and about, black Americans is indistinguishable from the way their Republican counterparts do. And President Obama has been as guilty as anyone. A year before Ryan made his remarks, Obama delivered a commencement address at the historically black Morehouse College, where he warned the graduates at the prestigious all-male school that they shouldn’t use racism as an excuse, and to be good fathers.

Politicians regularly deploy this type of shaming when referring to, or even when addressing, black Americans. But it’s hard to fathom a politician, Democrat or Republican, standing before a predominately white crowd in a sagging old coal town, and blaming the community’s economic woes on poor parenting or lack of work ethic or a victim mentality. Those Americans, white Americans, are worthy of government help. Their problems are not of their own making, but systemic, institutional, out of their control. They are never blamed for their lot in life. They have had jobs snatched away by bad federal policy, their opportunities stolen by inept politicians.

It would have been easy, expected, for Trump in his speeches to recycle the same old personal-responsibility narrative for black voters. But Trump didn’t call for black people to stop lazing around and use a little more elbow grease on those bootstraps. He was pushing for more government — Republican-led government — to help black folks prosper, a racially specific new deal that included investing in schools, high-wage jobs and black entrepreneurs. And in doing so, Trump, at least rhetorically, did something the Democrats and Republicans have largely failed to do — he took black citizens into the ranks of “hardworking Americans” worthy of the government’s hand.

To be clear, I am not arguing that the man who called for the execution of the since-exonerated Central Park Five (and who still insists on their guilt) and who seeks nationwide implementation of the stop-and-frisk program ruled unconstitutional in New York City, and who warns that voting in heavily black cities is rigged, is a racial progressive who will enact policies that will help black communities. Nor am I saying black voters should buy what Trump is selling. (And they aren’t: A poll released last week by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College of likely voters in Pennsylvania found that “no black respondent from Philadelphia supported Mr. Trump in the survey.”)

What I am saying is that when Trump claims Democratic governance has failed black people, when he asks “the blacks” what they have to lose, he is asking a poorly stated version of a question that many black Americans have long asked themselves. What dividends, exactly, has their decades-long loyalty to the Democratic ticket paid them? By brushing Trump’s criticism off as merely cynical or clueless rantings, we are missing an opportunity to have a real discussion of the failures of progressivism and Democratic leadership when it comes to black Americans.

Trump is not wrong when he says that black Americans have suffered in a particular way in blue cities and blue states. (Of course, they suffer in red states as well.) The most segregated cities have long been clustered above the Mason-Dixon line and are Democratically run. Some of the most segregated schools in the country educate students in New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee. Efforts to integrate schools in these cities have met resistance from white progressives. Democrats did as much to usher in the era of mass incarceration as anyone else. And in these cities, with their gaping income inequality, black communities shoulder a terrible burden of gun violence, high unemployment, substandard schools and poverty.

Though black Americans these days consistently vote Democratic at higher margins than any other racial group, this wasn’t always the case. Before 1948, black voters were fairly evenly split between Republican and Democrats. Then President Harry S. Truman pushed a civil rights platform, and a majority of black voters swung Democratic, though a significant percentage still identified as Republican. That changed in the 1960s, when black voters moved en masse to the Democratic Party after Lyndon B. Johnson showed he was willing to lose the South in order to pass the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Southern Democrats abandoned the party to become Republicans, and Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a Southern strategy of stalling forward movement on civil rights. And the party of Lincoln came to be considered anathema to black progress.

In the intervening years, modern Democrats have been far more likely to support social programs that help the poor, who are disproportionately black, and to support civil rights policies. But since Johnson left office, Democrats have done little to address the systemic issues — housing and school segregation — that keep so many black Americans in economic distress and that make true equality elusive. At the federal level, despite the fact that the National Fair Housing Alliance estimates that black Americans experiences millions of incidents of housing discrimination every year, Democrats, like Republicans, have avoided strong enforcement of federal fair-housing laws that would allow black families to move to opportunity-rich areas. Both Democrats and Republicans have failed to pursue school-integration policies that would ensure black children gain access to the good schools white kids attend. In the 1970s and ’80s, Trump battled housing-discrimination lawsuits, while Senator Clinton was noticeably quiet when Westchester County, N.Y., a county that twice voted decidedly for Obama, fought a court order to integrate its whitest towns, including Chappaqua, the 2-percent-black town she calls home.

Instead of seeking aggressive racial-equality initiatives, Democrats too often have opted for a sort of trickle-down liberalism. If we work to strengthen unions, that will trickle down to you. If we work to strengthen health care, that will trickle down to you. If we work to make all schools better, that will trickle down to you. After decades of Democratic loyalty, too many black Americans are still awaiting that trickle.

While Republicans rarely make any effort to court black voters, Democrats do reach out to them. But Democratic politicians have also shown again and again that they will sacrifice the needs of their most loyal constituents in order to win larger political points. I will never forget how in February 2013, President Obama flew to Chicago to give a speech that touched on gun violence. He spoke of the random shooting of Hadiya Pendleton, a Chicago teenager who had performed at his inaugural events. “There’s no more important ingredient for success, nothing that would be more important for us reducing violence than strong, stable families — which means we should do more to promote marriage and encourage fatherhood,” Obama told the predominantly black audience. But two months earlier, when he gave a speech about the Newtown shooting, he’d said no such thing about fathers and marriage, even though that violent act was carried out by a young white man from a broken home. Instead, he emphasized Congress’s inability to pass gun control. The message: Black killings are the black community’s fault; white killings are a failure of government.

Trump, in turning the usual rhetoric on its head — claiming that black people are living in inner-city hells and should therefore spurn the Democratic Party — has forced progressives, both black and white, into the uncomfortable position of arguing that things aren’t nearly as bad for black America as Trump would have us believe. In the weeks before Trump’s alleged sexual improprieties overtook everything else, writers dashed off thousands of words arguing that the “inner cities” are improving (gentrification!) and that poverty is not just in the inner city but in suburban America too, and that there are lots of middle-class black folks doing just fine, thank you. Writers pointed out that Trump was wrong when he said nearly half of inner-city black children are poor when it’s actually just one-third. If Trump had raised these statistics and said black people needed to simply work harder, these same people would be arguing that candidates needed to be talking about what they were going to do address the systemic causes of devastatingly high poverty and unemployment rates that black Americans experience. And they would have been right. 

Most black Americans live neither in poverty nor in the inner city. And even those of us who do live in inner cities aren’t living in hell. But the inequality that black Americans experience is stark. Black children are more segregated from white children now than at any point since the early ’70s. United States census data shows that a black middle-class family is more likely to live in a poor neighborhood than a poor white family. The wealth gap between white and black families is the widest it has been in nearly three decades. This is true in cities and states run by Republicans. This is true in cities and states run by Democrats.

Regardless of how you feel about Trump, on this one thing he is right: The Democratic Party has taken black Americans for granted. The problem is — and this is where Trump’s rhetoric is just that, rhetoric — black people aren’t loyal Democrats because they don’t know any better. They are making an informed decision. As Theodore R. Johnson, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy and an expert on black voting behavior, points out in his research, black Americans are an electoral monolith out of necessity. Black people care about the environment and the economy and international issues, and they generally fall across the spectrum on a range of issues, just like all other human beings. But while the Democratic Party might be accused of upholding the racial status quo, the Republican Party has a long track record of working to restrict the remedies available to increase housing and school integration and equal opportunities in employment and college admissions. And most critical, Republicans have passed laws that have made the hallmark of full citizenship — the right to vote — more difficult for black Americans. Since first securing the right to vote, black Americans have had to be single-issue voters — and that single issue is basic citizenship rights. Maintaining these rights will always and forever transcend any other issue. And so black Americans can never jump ship to a party they understand as trying to erode the hard-fought rights black citizens have died to secure.

But it is also true that black Americans have not always been single-party voters, and they don’t have to remain so. If Democrats want to keep black voters, they need to work for those votes, because one day Republicans might wise up. Until then, when Trump asks what the hell do black Americans have to lose? Well, a hell of a lot.

Is Donald Trump a Racist?

Written by Nicholas Kristof

HAS the party of Lincoln just nominated a racist to be president? We shouldn’t toss around such accusations lightly, so I’ve looked back over more than 40 years of Donald Trump’s career to see what the record says.

One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.

I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.

To prove the discrimination, blacks were repeatedly dispatched as testers to Trump apartment buildings to inquire about vacancies, and white testers were sent soon after. Repeatedly, the black person was told that nothing was available, while the white tester was shown apartments for immediate rental.

A former building superintendent working for the Trumps explained that he was told to code any application by a black person with the letter C, for colored, apparently so the office would know to reject it. A Trump rental agent said the Trumps wanted to rent only to “Jews and executives,” and discouraged renting to blacks.

Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.

In fairness, those suits date from long ago, and the discriminatory policies were probably put in place not by Donald Trump but by his father. Fred Trump appears to have been arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927; Woody Guthrie, who lived in a Trump property in the 1950s, lambasted Fred Trump in recently discovered papers for stirring racial hatred.

Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement.

Another revealing moment came in 1989, when New York City was convulsed by the “Central Park jogger” case, a rape and beating of a young white woman. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested.

Trump stepped in, denounced Mayor Ed Koch’s call for peace and bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty. The five teenagers spent years in prison before being exonerated. In retrospect, they suffered a modern version of a lynching, and Trump played a part in whipping up the crowds.

As Trump moved into casinos, discrimination followed. In the 1980s, according to a former Trump casino worker, Kip Brown, who was quoted by The New Yorker: “When Donald and Ivana came to the casino, the bosses would order all the black people off the floor. … They put us all in the back.”

In 1991, a book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump as criticizing a black accountant and saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” O’Donnell wrote that for months afterward, Trump pressed him to fire the black accountant, until the man resigned of his own accord.

Trump eventually denied making those comments. But in 1997 in a Playboy interview, he conceded “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”

The recent record may be more familiar: Trump’s suggestions that President Obama was born in Kenya; his insinuations that Obama was admitted to Ivy League schools only because of affirmative action; his denunciations of Mexican immigrants as, “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States; his dismissal of an American-born judge of Mexican ancestry as a Mexican who cannot fairly hear his case; his reluctance to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview; his retweet of a graphic suggesting that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent); and so on.

Trump has also retweeted messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers, including two from an account called @WhiteGenocideTM with a photo of the American Nazi Party’s founder.

Trump repeatedly and vehemently denies any racism, and he has deleted some offensive tweets. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi racist website that has endorsed Trump, sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”

(Update: After this column was published, the Trump campaign emailed me the following statement: “Donald Trump has a lifetime record of inclusion and has publicly rebuked groups who seek to discriminate against others on numerous occasions. To suggest otherwise is a complete fabrication of the truth.”)

My view is that “racist” can be a loaded word, a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.

And yet.

Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.