Donald Trump’s America Doesn’t Care About Black Women

By Bridget Todd

I was writing about race and politics for my college newspaper when Don Imus called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed hoes.”

“What did those girls ever do to anyone except be Black and exist?” I wondered to myself.

But you would not know that I found this troubling at all from the column I published about Imus’ firing. I went out of my way to explain that I wasn’t bothered by his comments:

“I’m probably the only black person in the country who doesn’t think Don Imus deserves to be fired. His ‘nappy headed ho’ comment didn’t upset me.”

Why did I write that? Why did I publish something that wasn’t the truth about how I was actually feeling? If I’m being generous about 19-year-old me’s intentions, I might say I wanted to snap people out of the idea that all Blacks are a monolith. But I think I just wanted the white people at my college to like me. I wanted them to smile at me when I made eye contact with them on campus. I wanted to make sure my white professors and classmates didn’t see the “nappy headed hoe” in me.

The white people at my college were generally nice people, but this was the south…