Trump’s “Outreach” is a Damaging Exercise in How to Further Alienate African Americans
By Diallo Brooks, Director of Outreach and Public Engagement at People For the American Way
This weekend Donald Trump is slated to make his first campaign appearance with a primarily African American audience when he visits a Black church in Detroit. It’s part of a new “outreach” campaign that is supposedly aimed at generating support from Black voters, but so far has been a painful example of how to even further alienate people of color.
Trump’s idea of outreach to African American voters seems to be hinged on painting a narrow, grim picture of what it means to be Black in America. African American neighborhoods are “war zones,” he says. Black Americans are “living in poverty” and “58 percent of your youth is unemployed.” And most offensive of all, Trump asks: “What do you have to lose?”
Note to Trump advisors: saying an entire community has nothing to lose will never be outreach — it can only be an insult.
It should go without saying that Trump’s rhetoric does not reflect reality. Most African Americans are not living in poverty. His statistic about Black youth unemployment is wildly off-base, with the real unemployment rate coming in at less than a third of Trump’s number. While gun violence is a serious issue in many neglected Black neighborhoods, categorizing all Black neighborhoods as “war zones” reinforces stereotypes without addressing real problems of economic neglect and hundreds of years of structural racism.
There are certainly real challenges around racial and economic inequality in this country, but Trump is not talking about solutions. He’s not highlighting issues so he can offer a comprehensive agenda to address the racial injustices plaguing our country. What he is doing is pushing dangerous stereotypes to white voters about African Americans as a monolithic community of violent, impoverished people with nothing to lose. As columnist Charles Blow noted, Trump’s so-called outreach has been an exercise in the “most insidious kind of bigotry” where “he is using us as pawns” to reach white voters who don’t want to believe they are voting for a bigot.
Trump’s disingenuous efforts can’t disguise the real harm he has done, and continues to do, when it comes to the fight for racial justice in America. Long before this election cycle, federal investigators found that employees of the real estate business led by Donald Trump and his father were marking the housing applications of people of color with codes, like “C” for “colored,” allegedly engaging in flagrant housing discrimination. In recent years, Trump has been one of the fervent promoters of the “birther” conspiracy theory attempting to undermine the legitimacy of the country’s first Black president. As a presidential candidate, his track record has continued to be abysmal. He kicked off his campaign by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals, and went on to repeatedly question whether a federal judge could do his job because of his Mexican heritage. He condoned the violent attack of a Black protestor by white attendees at one of his rallies, saying “maybe he should have been roughed up.” Perhaps most harmful of all, he has energized white supremacists, providing new platforms for people who were once considered the fringiest of the fringe. He put front-and-center in his campaign a man who headed up a publication that pushes racist conspiracy theories and defends white nationalists.
When it comes to Trump’s views and track record on race, we’ve already seen enough. While his “outreach” efforts to African Americans may not be real, the damage done by pushing poisonous lies, engaging in discriminatory business practices, and helping to legitimize white supremacist views certainly is.
