Apparently, President Orange Crush is participating in a White House reception for National African American History Month Thursday evening. Thing is, no Black person wants to hear about Donald Trump doing anything in relation to Black History Month. It’s the equivalent of the Big Bad Wolf serving as a keynote speaker for the NPAA (National Piglets Acceptance Association). Remember when Trump talked about Frederick Douglass in the present tense? Yeah. He’s really, really bad at Black things. We know he’s not here for us, but just to make it crystal clear, here is a (very) down-sized list of moments that explain why he should skip the whole Black History Month celebration charade.
(Note: Listing about how Trump is not here for any ethnicity that doesn’t require sunblock would take all day.)
1. Atrocious treatment of Charlottesville: The Charlottesville white supremacist rally in 2017 was handily the most overt and publicized display of racism we’ve seen on American soil this generation. The president of the United States had a pretty softball opportunity to directly condemn the rally and its participants. What did he do…? Talk about how there were “some very fine people” on the side of the bad guys as well as condemn the counter-protesters. Dude just had to sympathize with and protect his white supremacist friends. No surprise that people feel that the very culture Trump created begat the rally itself.
2. High priest of the birther movement: The first time many of us viewed Trump outside of the lens of billionaire real estate mogul and reality television star is when he first fixed his mouth in 2011 to insist that Barack Obama was lying about being born in the United States. That he was one of the most recognizable names to do so gave a narrative steeped in racism more energy than it deserved to thrive. Looking at that alone, there’s no surprise that he moved up the ranks to become white America’s panacea for eight years with a Black man in the White House.
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3. Anti-everything Kaepernick: Trump has been a well-known opponent of the protest of the National Anthem that NFL player Colin Kaepernick kicked off. He let off a fusillade of wack tweets condemning the protest and said publicly, “Get that son of a bitch off the field.” There’s probably nothing else that more publicly personifies the Black Lives Matter movement than Kaepernick’s protest, and we know that the man leading the country has no support in it whatsoever.
4. Black countries =“sh*tholes:” There was the whole “Muslim ban” clusterf— that was designed to keep foreigners who don’t look like his foreign wife out of the country. But he reportedly said “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” in reference to Haiti and other African countries during a bipartisan conference in 2018. He’s also allegedly made comments about Haitians having AIDS and Nigerians living in huts. He denied making all of these comments, but come on…who the f— are we kidding?
5. Wouldn’t rent to Black folks: Trump’s earliest transgressions against us occurred before many of us were drawing breath. The U.S. Department of Justice sued the Trump Management Corporation in 1973 because the company allegedly violated the Fair Housing Act by refusing to rent to Black tenants and flat-out lied to them about the availability of units for rental. He had to sign an agreement in 1975 agreeing not to do it anymore. For those of you at home keeping a tally, that’s nearly a half century of Trump’s white male bullshit.
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Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.