Vice President JD Vance is being slammed for remarks he made about white people in America, while delivering a speech at Turning Point USA’s AmFest on Sunday.
Vance praised Nicki Minaj, who participated in a sit-down interview with Turning Point USA’s CEO Erika Kirk. During the exchange, the 43-year-old rapper argued that empowering Black Americans came at the expense of white people’s feelings.
“In the media, it’s almost been like a push to…not just making young Black children feel proud of themselves, but it’s almost like doing that and at the same time, telling other children not to be proud of themselves. And I don’t want any child feeling that way,” said Minaj, who has recently praised the Trump-Vance Administration’s anti-trans and foreign policies.
Minaj, real name Onika Maraj-Petty, continued, “If, as Black women, we felt that we were not being represented, and not being admired for our beauty, if we felt like that as Black women, why would we want to do that to other women? Why would we now need to make other people downplay their beauty?”
During his remarks, Vance used Minaj’s comments about race to justify white grievance.
“I love what Nikki said about this. We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex. So we have relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it belongs in the United States of America,” said the Vice President. “You don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.”
Reecie Colbert, a political analyst and host of Sirius XM’s “The Reecie Colbert,” said of Vance’s remarks, “White men want to be oppressed so bad, while having all of the power…the disconnect between reality and this white grievance that they’re selling is just astounding.”
Colbert took particular issue with Minaj, telling theGrio, “[It’s] disgusting and unconscionable to provide this kind of fuel for literal white nationalists at a time when JD Vance and Trump are attacking the Black community, attacking our citizenship, attacking our humanity, attacking our economic viability.”
She added, “She is giving them the cover to say, look, it’s coming from a Black person.”
Vance’s remarks about white Americans come after a year of policy actions taken by the Trump White House that civil rights leaders and Democrats have slammed as deliberately anti-Black. Those actions include eliminating racial equity programs throughout the federal government, including decades-old executive orders intended to enforce civil rights laws that protected Black Americans from racial discrimination in employment.
Last week, Trump’s chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a PSA specifically to white men.
“Are you a white male who’s experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws,” said Andrea Lucas in a video.
Despite the administration’s insinuation of white discrimination, the Black unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 8.3%, which is disproportionately higher than the national average of 4.6%, while the unemployment rate for white men is ironically below the national rate at 3.6%.
The Trump-Vance administration has also embraced white grievance in its foreign policy, like accepting white Afrikaners from South Africa, which President Donald Trump has falsely claimed is committing a genocide against white farmers. By contrast, most of the administration’s travel bans and revocations of Temporary Protected Status have impacted African nations and Haiti.
Colbert said Black and other marginalized groups, including poor white people, will ultimately suffer from Trump’s policies and their lack of effectiveness in addressing America’s affordability crisis.
“What JD Vance is trying to do is to distract white people from their insurance premiums, from the lack of affordability, from all the carnage that that Big, Ugly Bill is going to cause in their lives next year,” she said of Trump’s signature tax and spending bill that experts say will only benefit the nation’s wealthiest Americans and corporations, while making historic cuts to social programs like Mediciad and SNAP.
“They actually do not want to solve those things. And so to the extent that they can distract white people…to get white people to feel like we’re on your side, then that allows them to continue looting the United States and looting the world of resources with very little pushback,” said Colbert.
