Trump picks the perfect time to show off his ignorance about black Americans
How did you celebrate MLK Jr. weekend?
President-elect Donald Trump decided it was the perfect occasion to criticize a living civil rights icon, unloading a series of tweets describing Rep. John Lewis’s Georgia district as “crime infested” and accusing the former Freedom Rider of being “All talk, talk, talk — no action or results. Sad!” He later added : “Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!”’
Sad indeed. But Trump’s tweets might have actually been MLK-weekend-appropriate, in a perverse way. They serve as an illuminating if disheartening preview of what the next four years might look like for black Americans, unwillingly led by a president who sees us as a barely functioning sector of society.
Whatever his political flaws, President Obama helped to normalize the idea that black people in the United States are, in fact, people — who could be professionally successful, have admirable family lives, might live not in crumbling projects but even in the White House.
Black Americans have always known this, of course; despite what the news might have you believe, success isn’t foreign to us and stability is not unattainable. But over the past eight years it felt as though it had became a bit easier for others in our country to see us as fellow citizens rather than stereotypes or sad caricatures. Finally we were afforded the wide variety of possibilities supposedly allowed to all Americans, rather than being treated like a perpetually distressed special-interest group.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-picks-the-perfect-time-to-show-off-his-ignorance-about-black-americans/2017/01/16/07000e2e-dc16-11e6-ad42-f3375f271c9c_story.html?utm_term=.1321d03a5abe
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