When Race is All You Have

8-3-2024

When Race is All You Have

There’s been a lot of talk about Trump speaking at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in Chicago a few days ago but nothing was said about the questions he was asked.

When asked by co-moderator Rachael Scott if Trump thought VP Kamala Harris was a DEI  Vice President only because she was a black woman, Trump’s response was a question back at her to “define what you say D.E.I. is”?

The media then accused Trump of accusing Harris of being a DEI candidate.

In fact Trump’s answer, “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black, and now she wants to be known as Black,” the former president said of Harris. Trump went on to say “Is she Indian or is she Black? Because she was Indian all the way and then all of a sudden she made a turn and she went she became a Black person.” “So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she Black?” 

“But you know what, I respect either one,” Trump said. “But she obviously doesn’t. Because she was Indian all the way then all of a sudden she made a turn. And she became a Black person. And I think somebody should look into that.”

It’s true that Harris’s mother is from India, and her father from Jamaica is of mixed India and African heritage so she is a mixture of South Asian India and Jamaican African and a California born American.

What makes this encounter even worse is that both former President Trump and Vice President Harris were invited to speak at the NABJ, but Harris never showed up, citing other pressing commitments, which is pretty convenient when it’s an organization representing black journalists.

Maybe the NABJ didn’t expect Trump to accept, but surely Harris would have accepted the invitation?

It’s not the first time Trump spoke to an almost exclusively black audience if you go back to the fall of 2015 when Trump invited prominent black pastors to Trump Tower where they told him of their concerns about him and he gave them his view of his political rallies (Ch 17: The Faith of Donald J. Trump).

As president, Trump would go on to give permanent funding to HBCU what no other president before or since had done.

The media even reported that Trump “almost” walked out of the NABJ meeting. How does one almost do something? (It’s either did or didn’t, not almost did.)

I like what Harris Faulkner said about Trump’s performance at the NABJ “it did get a little chippy”.

Trump is almost always portrayed in the media as the divider, but when you review the facts (not the facts as they are reported) it’s clear that the real divider(s) are those persons, personalities, or organizations that use race and racial terms in their titles or names. – RTM