Well, you know, if Trump were to have delivered last night's speech at an inner city location where there are more than 20 black people available to be in the audience, it may have been impactful.
Do you know how many people live in West Bend, WI? ~31K. What percentage of them are black people? 1% If Trump wanted to be sure
to have a substantial share of black folks in his audience he could have delivered his speech in any number of places:
- Detroit, MI -- Oh, wow...Detroit, now there's an interesting place to deliver a speech that at least a dozen times in about 10 minutes expressly calls out to mentions black voters. It's even in one of the so-called battleground states....
- Miami Gardens, FL -- Oh, boy...lookee there...another large black community in another "battleground" state.
- Flint, MI -- Darn, a third heavily black community in Michigan. Hillary Clinton didn't go to Flint did she? Oh, wait, she went there at the height of their water crisis, but I suppose that didn't do anything to make those folks feel as though she gave a damn about them, even if she had to bring her own water. I'd wager that literally millions of "regular" people donated something to help the people in Flint during the crisis.
- And as long as we are remembering that Flint residents didn't have potable water, let's not forget thatTrump "makes" Trump Natural Spring Water. Did any of that water get donated to Flint? Hell no! Trump refused to even comment on the crisis.
- Savannah, GA -- Wonder of wonders. There's a meaningfully sized black community there too, and wouldn't you just know that he's struggling in the polls in GA. I guess that makes it yet another lousy place to make an appeal to black voters.
- New Orleans, LA -- How bad a place can New Orleans be for delivering a speech to black folks? The Saints stadium and the Convention center are "a stone's throw" from the 9th Ward. (Hell, forget black folks. What about just regular folks suffering hardship? The folks in Baton Rouge and the surrounding area who are flooded out, for example. Have you heard word one from Trump about them?)
- Harlem, NYC -- For the love of God! The man doesn't even have to go far from his own damn home to reach out to blacks.
Now of course simply making a big speech in a venue that is sure to have a heavily black audience is just a gesture, but at the very least it's start, which, quite frankly, aside from a few empty words and accusations in last night's speech about what someone else has not accomplished instead of remarks about how and what he will accomplish, Trump hasn't even made. And, yes, more than a gesture and a few empty words are going to be necessary, for even though there are some blacks who "buy" Trump's BS and who are willing to overlook his prior
deliberate acts of derision toward blacks, the fact remains that most blacks have enough experience with recognizing race-based discrimination and being overlooked, especially by folks from Trump's strata of society. Don't forget, black folks have worked in the homes of folks like Trump and his parents.
If one doesn't think those people hear "stuff" and can tell "what's what" with the folks they work for, and cannot tell when folks are just "smiling in their face," one is insanely naive. I know the majority of black folks can tell a bigot when they interact with or observe one. On more than one occasion when Daddy had company over, the black women who worked in our home would come into the kitchen where I was and start singing "
Smiling Faces" right after Daddy had made some sort of complimentary remark, usually about the food and wonderful spread that had been prepared, because they had plenty of times also overheard what he said on other occasions when he had no idea they were within earshot. Yes, outwardly and in terms of pay and so on, Daddy did right by those women, but inside and based on things he said to me about black folks, he thought better of his dogs. He's better than that now, but he's only going to get but so much better....Even so, he knows Trump's "stripes," or at least what they look like, just as do black folks, Latinos, David Duke and others.
And another thing. I know Trumpeteers are quick to try to introduce comparisons with other folks. In this case the comparison will be with Hillary and Bill Clinton. So, in preemptive mode, let me point out some facts that go well beyond mere gesture.
- A Harlem rally served as both reunion and reintroduction for Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton has an office in Harlem.
- HIllary Clinton did show up in Flint, MI during the water crisis and her donors contributed half a million dollars to the cause. (also: Beyond the talk, here's what Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are doing to actually help Flint)
- Bill Clinton's office was in Harlem.
- The Clintons have lived among and interacted closely with blacks since they were "knee-high to nothing." Some of their good deeds make news, like the millions of black kids helped by the Clinton Foundation, and other bits of it only make their way through the "community grapevine." (Blacks and Latinos know what I'm talking about.)
- Toni Morrison made it very clear for all how Bill Clinton has lived the black experience writing:
- After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke? The message was clear: “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us.”
White folks of many stripes and great in number, even some of us who do a somewhat decent job of it and how are genuine in skirking the legacy into which we were born, being proud of ourselves while we too hold in equal regard our non-white brethren, often enough succumb to viewing race, it's attendant issues and strife, as merely matters of skin color. Make no mistake, it is that, but it's also much, much more than just that. You see, for as much as race has been about melanin, or physical features, the hued and unhidden aspects of it harbor within and issue largely from the need to name, to label someone before doing something to them. Race is not a sober-minded description of peoples. It is
casus belli.
Plain and simple race is little but shorthand for the variously overt and covert battle for power: one side trying to get a share of it and the other husbanding it in any way possible for themselves. Clinton isn’t black, in Morrison’s rendition, because he knows every verse of Lift Every Voice and Sing, but because the powers arrayed against him find their most illustrative analogue in white supremacy. “
People misunderstood that phrase,” Morrison would later say. “I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp.”
Now, one can make all sorts of arguments over whether the pursuit of Clinton was, in fact, analogous to how black people have been regarded across American history. But Morrison was not giving Clinton an award. She was welcoming him into a club which should not exist.
Most Americans understand race as indelible—as a thing which you really are—and thus Morrison’s point went right over the heads of even relatively educated people. This is convenient. As long as “race” can be considered as who you are, and not what someone else did to you, then Americans can see themselves as heroic do-gooders in struggling against our more ignorant and animalistic impulses.
So when Donald Trump with gall overflowing says that the Clintons, Hillary or Bill, don't care about the circumstances of African Americans...When Trump to just about the whitest audiences he can fine -- be it the folks in West Bend, WI or the folks in the GOP convention with it's 18 black delegates -- utters platitudes of attesting to his desire to help African Americans in one sentence and the very next sentence about restoring law and order tacitly remarking that they are the source of the lawlessness....When Trump has yet to accept an invitation to appear before any major black organization....When Trump does all that, black folks aren't too damned dumb to know what he really means. And while a gesture is nice and it will be welcomed, he's still got a long way to go between now and November....
Trump's been at this campaigning thing for over a year and here, the ides of August 2016, is when he finally decides he should talk about African Americans and all he wants to do for them? Puh-lease! I don't know who I think is the bigger fool. Him for trying to get folks to believe his sh*t or the folks who actually do believe it.
And and he has the nerve to accuse Hillary Clinton and Democrats of caring naught about blacks but for their votes come election season! Even assuming he's right, a proposition having odds comparable to that of the Second Coming being this Friday, but just for grins assuming he is right, can you say "psychological projection?" Yessiree, Bob. Can the pot call the kettle black and think the skillet don't know what's going on? Not today, baby.
"Lots of black folks were born at night, but not nary enough of them were born last night."
-- 320 Years of History, paraphrasing an idiom that's been around "forever"
