President Donald Trump‘s racist resentment toward Black and brown people was undeniable during his first State of the Union address Tuesday night. Sandwiched between spouting his familiar refrain of “America first” and pretending to reach across the aisle to Democrats, Trump launched a steady barrage of subliminal darts aimed at people with a darker skin hue.
In just about an hour and 20 minutes, Trump managed to take a pot shot at Colin Kaepernick and all of the people who protest racism and police brutality, falsely take credit for low Black unemployment, painted a picture of immigrants with a very broad, Black brush, scapegoated Black folks for the opioid crisis, continued to embellish about the Black homeownership rate and slighted the only Black and brown special guests.
Members of Congressional Black Caucus offer no reaction as Pres. Trump says "African-American unemployment stands at the lowest rate ever recorded" in #SOTUaddress https://t.co/q18EZzVe9p pic.twitter.com/Xxkqc7hFt9
— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 31, 2018
Of the Democrats who were there — many boycotted — the ones who stood out the most were the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) members, who were draped in Kente cloth, presumably to protest Trump’s supposedly alleged comments where he preferred to African nations as “sh**hole countries.”
Black unemployment dropped from 12.7% to 7.8% under Obama. It has dropped from 7.8% to 6.8% under Trump. The area to the right of the red line is the Trump era. pic.twitter.com/YI6AJYreXJ
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 31, 2018
When he explained “why we stand for the national anthem,” he failed to mention that he just so happened to inherit a thriving economy with lasting momentum created by President Barack Obama, another of Trump’s preferred targets of color.
Taking the knee is about bringing attention to police involved shootings not against soldiers or the flag nor the the anthem.
— AprilDRyan (@AprilDRyan) January 31, 2018
But it may have been the topics of immigration and drugs when Trump took his racial profiling to the next level.
First, he used Black and brown families whose daughters were killed by the MS-13 gang to demonstrate a nonexistent correlation to violent immigrants, something that could potentially serve as a way to divide and not unite families of color.
"To equate that with Dreamers and DACA was completely irresponsible. And it was scapegoating and fear-mongering. And it was wrong."@KamalaHarris responds to President Trump invoking MS-13 at #SOTU
Watch more: https://t.co/jAgT9haNH3 pic.twitter.com/DacLrkka4c
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) January 31, 2018
Never mind the fact that we are fresh off the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, courtesy of a White, American born terrorist. Of course, Trump made no reference to the massacre in Las Vegas.
Perhaps even worse, Trump “implied that Dreamers are gang members,” Van Jones said on CNN afterward, referring to Trump’s comment that “Americans are dreamers, too.”
Then he declared that “we must get much tougher on drug dealers and pushers if we are going to succeed in stopping this scourge,” as if the opioid epidemic hasn’t been fueled by many White doctors writing bogus prescriptions as a means to enrich themselves at the expense of getting patients hooked on pills. Meanwhile, big pharma gets a tax break.
Trump really just blamed the opioid crisis on black people, didn’t he?
— Nathaniel Friedman (@freedarko) January 31, 2018
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