“No Surprise, Trump Again Loud And Wrong”: Trump Is Woefully Ignorant About Minority Youths In America
“Ignoramus,” according to Merriam-Webster, was the name of a fictional 17th-century lawyer who regarded himself as rather shrewd when, in fact, he was quite foolish and ignorant. Enter Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee who denounced U.S. District Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel as too biased to oversee lawsuits involving Trump University because the judge was, as Trump referred to him, “a Mexican.”
Senior Judge Theodore R. Newman Jr. of the D.C. Court of Appeals, former chairman of the U.S. Fine Arts Commission Harry G. Robinson III, D.C. venture capitalist James L. Hudson, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick, NBC4 news anchor Jim Vance, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights President Wade Henderson, D.C. elder statesman Carl Anderson, former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, D.C. Council member Brandon Todd, BET founder Robert Johnson and more than 150,000 members of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, including this lifetime member and columnist, have another name for Curiel: We call him “Brother.”
Trump, no surprise, again was loud and wrong.
Curiel was born in Indiana, where he was initiated into predominantly African American Kappa Alpha Psi at Indiana University.
Labeling — or mislabeling — is pure Trump. Why bother to get to know anything about a person when pigeonholing into an ethnic, racial, religious or sexual identity will do?
But it is not Curiel’s name, his parents’ Mexican heritage or his fraternal choice that stand out. What lifts him up, as a fraternity leader said in a tribute to him against Trump’s bigotry, is Curiel’s decision to become part of a diverse membership of high achievers from all backgrounds who firmly oppose the practice of judging someone on the basis of race or ethnic origin.
Trump, in his ignorance, would never understand. His is a world of oversimplified compartmentalization: “the Latinos,” “the Muslims,” “the gays.”
And he knows it all, especially when it comes to — his words again — “the blacks.”
In the aftermath of the Baltimore rioting over Freddie Gray’s death, Trump pronounced, “And if you look at black and African American youth, to a point where they’ve never done more poorly. There’s no spirit.”
Thus saith Trump. He saith wrong. But, in truth, Trump has had help in reaching his crooked conclusions.
The local evening news brings tales of black community breakdowns, broken bodies and so much blood. Case in point: The Post’s feature story this week about a black teen in Baltimore trying to graduate from his troubled high school when so many of his classmates are dying. It’s regular newspaper fare, and the kind of stuff trumpeted by Trump.
But The Post’s account and Trump’s portrayal don’t capture the narrative of today’s African American and other youths of color.
Those stories are found where the denigrators of black and brown youths, and many in the media, fail to go.
Trump and his ilk should have been with me last month at the Sumner School Museum for the 28th Celebration of Youth essay contest sponsored by Global Harmony Through Personal Excellence, where dozens of Grade 4 through 9 scholars demonstrated wisdom beyond their years. “No spirit”? They made you want to stand up and cheer.
Too bad Trump wasn’t around last week to see the commencement celebration of Chavez Capitol Hill High School, a public charter school of mostly black and Latino youths, most economically disadvantaged — and most college-bound.
They, too, know what life is like for The Post’s young man in Baltimore. Many of them were the first in their families to graduate high school. Life for them has been hard, too.
They are youths who care about what’s going on in their communities. More important, they believe they can make a difference. Most will be off to college in the fall. Keep that “no spirit” garbage to yourself, Trump.
If last year’s high school graduation numbers are any guide, the Chavez students will be joined by more than 3,000 other D.C. high school students who received diplomas this spring. Many of them will also continue their education. They aren’t victims. They are spirited.
Kids “have never done more poorly,” declares Trump. Tell that to the more than 600 graduates of D.C. schools who have been awarded more than $1.2 million in scholarships by Curiel’s Washington Alumni brothers and their Kappa Scholarship Endowment Fund.
Trump, the know-it-all, should have attended the 176-year-old Nineteenth Street Baptist Church last Sunday to observe the congregation honor the college and high school graduates at Youth Recognition Day. Take in the sight of their adult mentors, volunteers and financial supporters.
Those scenes at the Chavez graduation, Nineteenth Street Baptist’s service, the youth essay contest, all the fundraisers, show that family and community supporters are not isolated stories. Those experiences are replicated below the radar in black and brown communities, and in churches and mosques and places of worship across the country. They are the rest of the story.
But if Trump doesn’t know from Mexican, why should he know any of this?
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 17, 2016
“Your Support For Brutality Or Your Life”: Plainly An Effort To Extort The Public For Support Of Police Brutality
In the latest and most open demonstration that some law enforcement officers are prone to go on strike if their tactics are challenged, two unnamed Baltimore cops blandly told CNN that citizens of the city had to choose between safety from criminals and safety from the police, per a report from Brooke Baldwin and Dana Ford:
Forty-two people were killed in Baltimore in May, making it the deadliest month there since 1972.
When asked what’s behind that number, a Baltimore police officer gave an alarming answer. Basically, he said, the good guys are letting the bad guys win.
“The criminal element feels as though that we’re not going to run the risk of chasing them if they are armed with a gun, and they’re using this opportunity to settle old beefs, or scores, with people that they have conflict with,” the officer said. “I think the public really, really sees that they asked for a softer, less aggressive police department, and we have given them that, and now they are realizing that their way of thinking does not work.”
In other words, prosecuting cops for killing Freddie Gray means criminals will run wild. Look in the other direction if some thugs wind up dead under murky circumstances, or you can kiss police protection good-bye.
I know we should not assume these two anonymous cops speak for their colleagues, but if so, they better speak up. This is pretty plainly an effort to extort support for brutality at the end of a gun–not a police service revolver, of course, but the gun hypothetically wielded by the “bad guys” because the “good guys” insist to do their job their way–laws be damned–or not at all.
Aside from the inherently poisonous nature of such demands, there’s not much question these officers are trying to stir up a public backlash against the elected officials, prosecutors and ultimately judges who are supposed to supervise their behavior. And there’s no question this is going to create a huge temptation for conservative politicians–maybe in Maryland, but more likely in far distance locations–to bring back the race-baiting law-n-order politics of the 1960s and 1970s.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 10, 2015
“Nobody’s Symbol, But Somebody’s Mother”: Toya Graham Simply Doing What Mothers Do
A few thoughts about Toya Graham, just in time for Mother’s Day.
You may not know her name, but you probably know what she did. You’ve probably seen the viral video of Graham, during last week’s unrest in Baltimore, using some rather pungent language and some open-handed smacks upside the head to pull her 16-year-old son out of the riot zone. She told CBS News he had gone there in defiance of her orders. When she saw him, dressed for mayhem in a black face mask, rock in hand, “I just lost it.”
In so doing, Graham, a single mother of six, has inadvertently become enmeshed in the ongoing shouting match between left and right. She has become a symbol — though neither side can agree on what she is a symbol of.
On the right, where many observers seem just a little too giddy over the image of a black boy being smacked, Fox “News” contributor Ben Stein called her “Rosa Parks for 2015.” It was an inane observation that minimized the legacy of Rosa Parks, but it was perfectly in line with the conservative view that says our most pressing concern in Baltimore’s unrest is “behavior” — i.e., the need to rein in lawless Negroes smashing windows and setting fires in the city.
Fact is, behavior is, indeed, our most pressing concern: but it’s the behavior of police in dealing with African-American citizens. Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man whom police arrested for carrying an illegal knife — a charge that is hotly disputed — somehow wound up with a partially severed spine while in their custody and died. Death seems to come with jarring frequency to unarmed black men who interact with police, something that ought to trouble us all.
The fact that some knuckleheaded black kids used the protest over Gray’s death as a pretext to riot — in other words, to behave as knuckleheaded white kids do after sports victories, sports defeats, and during last year’s pumpkin festival in Keene, NH — makes that no less true.
On the left, meantime, there is a tad too much dewy-eyed hand wringing over Graham’s resorting to violence to drag her son off the street. While conceding that her actions were “understandable and maybe even reasonable” under the circumstances, Eliyahu Federman, a columnist for USA Today, nevertheless wants you to know her parenting style was not “ideal” — whatever that means.
“Shouting and insulting teens just doesn’t work long term,” he writes. “You are more likely to positively modify teen misbehavior by calmly and maturely discussing the consequences of the misbehavior.” One struggles to imagine how a calm and mature discussion with a willful teenager might have played out at ground zero of an urban riot.
Look: that video — the hitting, the cursing — is not a pretty picture. Such tactics would never be endorsed by Parents magazine. On the other hand, the largely white and middle-class readership of that magazine likely does not live where Graham does, nor struggle with the challenges and fears she faces.
Every pundit, yours truly included, has the sometimes-regrettable habit of reducing people in the news to symbols of our own social and political concerns. But if we want to understand what she did, it might help to concede that Graham is nobody’s symbol, but somebody’s mother. As she said, she “lost it” because she feared her son might end up like Freddie Gray, another tragic police “oops.”
For most of us, that is a distant and unimaginable fear. But for some of us, it is a fear all too close and all too imaginable, a night terror that gnaws at sleep. Understand this, and that video becomes less of a mystery. When she saw her son in danger, Toya Graham waded in to save him from it — at all costs and by any means necessary.
Is that not what mothers do?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, May 6, 2015
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