Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gave a speech on Tuesday, August 16, where he stated that Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party had “failed and betrayed” black voters.
During his night-time rally in West Bend, Wisconsin, Trump blamed Clinton for furthering poverty and crime within inner cities across the nation. In order to solve this problem, Trump proposed getting more police officers out on the streets. He also vowed to appoint the country’s top prosecutors and judges to ensure that the nation’s laws were being enforced.
Reverend Al Sharpton was clearly not impressed by what he heard. In a phone interview with Politico, he made it perfectly clear that Trump does not have the black community’s best interest at heart. He said:
“If he cares about black voters, he certainly has shown a complete disregard and disrespect for addressing them and their issues. I don’t know what’s in his head, but I know where his body has been. And it’s been absent in terms of black concerns and black people and black audiences throughout his campaign.”
He went on to address Trump’s assertion that putting more police officers on the streets would help minorities in inner city communities. He assertively stated:
“To put more police out there without changing policing and without dealing with the issues is to increase the tension and increase of potential problems, not decrease. So either he has no understanding of the issue or he’s taking an absolute, adversarial position to where the country’s moving, or a combination of both.”
Members of the Black Lives Matter movement are also in agreement with Reverend Sharpton. DeRay Mckesson, a popular Black Lives Matter activist, also conducted a phone interview with Politico. He slammed Trump for attempting to connect to black people by using racist language that pitted minorities against one another. He is quoted as saying:
“He was talking about black people to a non-black crowd. That was his intent. He was racist even in those remarks. Saying that immigrants are gonna take the jobs of black people is racist. That is a problematic and racist statement.”
African-American members of the academic community feel exactly the same as Reverend Sharpton and Mckesson. Leah Wright Rigueur, a public policy professor at Harvard, believes that Trump has failed to actually go out into African-American communities and address them directly. She said:
“Donald Trump has yet to make a major policy or even rhetorical speech to primarily black audiences anywhere in the country, and I’m not necessarily talking about, you know, meeting with 200 black pastors in Trump Tower. I’m actually talking about going to Harlem and speaking, going to Chicago and speaking on the south side of Chicago.”
Reverend Sharpton vehemently agreed with Rigueur’s assessment of Trump. He even took it a step further and said that Trump’s message, if he were to go out and actually speak to the African-American community, would have to change significantly as well. He added:
“He’s not trying to talk to black voters because he would then have to defend his policies. He’d have to defend his business practices. If you are running as a business mogul, what black businesses have you subcontracted? Who have you done business with? Where are the blacks in the Trump Organization? He can’t answer those questions.”
It is increasingly clear, from the words we have heard from African-American leaders, that Donald Trump is trying to relate to minority communities by speaking his own language. He doesn’t seem to have the capacity to understand that people in the African-American community lead different lives than the majority of his supporters.
Trump would have to significantly change his message in order to garner a sympathetic ear from African-Americans. Clearly Reverend Sharpton and members of the black community feel strongly that he does not have the capacity to do this. Nor would his intentions be pure if he were to make the attempt.
Here is a video of Donald Trump’s rally in West Bend, Wisconsin where he attempts to address the issues of the African-American community:
