http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/24/opinion/sunday/is-donald-trump-a-racist.html
(I am embarrassed to say that I asked myself that same question when he announced for the presidency. Mexicans are rapists? That confused me. It didn't last long.)
...We shouldn’t toss around such accusations lightly, so I’ve looked back over more than 40 years of Donald Trump’s career to see what the record says.
One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.
I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.
Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.
In fairness, those suits date from long ago…
Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement.
Another revealing moment came in 1989, when New York City was convulsed by the “Central Park jogger” case, a rape and beating of a young white woman. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested.
[I remember that case vividly.]
Trump stepped in, denounced Mayor Ed Koch’s call for peace and bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.
[I remember those ads vividly.]
The five teenagers spent years in prison before being exonerated.
[I remember their exonerations vividly.]
As Trump moved into casinos, discrimination followed…
…
In 1991, a book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump as criticizing a black accountant and saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” O’Donnell wrote that for months afterward, Trump pressed him to fire the black accountant, until the man resigned of his own accord.
…in a Playboy interview, he conceded “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
The recent record may be more familiar:…President Obama was born in Kenya;…Obama was admitted to Ivy League schools only because of affirmative action…Mexican immigrants [are], “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; …temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States; …American-born judge of Mexican ancestry [is] a Mexican who cannot fairly hear his case;… reluctance to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview;…81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent); and so on.
… retweeted messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers [and so on]
Trump repeatedly and vehemently denies any racism, and he has deleted some offensive tweets. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi racist website that has endorsed Trump, sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”
My view is that “racist” can be a loaded word, [Omg Kristof.] a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. [Well, that's better.] It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.
And yet. [And so on?]
Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.
Serious? You're seriously having this conversation with yourself now, Mr. Kristof? You've missed all the wink-winks? Never heard all the tweet-tweet of the dog whistle?
OF COURSE HE'S A RACIST! HIS SUPPORTERS ARE RACISTS! THIS ENTIRE ELECTION HAS BEEN AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE ABOUT RACE!
(I am embarrassed to say that I asked myself that same question when he announced for the presidency. Mexicans are rapists? That confused me. It didn't last long.)
...We shouldn’t toss around such accusations lightly, so I’ve looked back over more than 40 years of Donald Trump’s career to see what the record says.
One early red flag arose in 1973, when President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department — not exactly the radicals of the day — sued Trump and his father, Fred Trump, for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals.
I’ve waded through 1,021 pages of documents from that legal battle, and they are devastating. Donald Trump was then president of the family real estate firm, and the government amassed overwhelming evidence that the company had a policy of discriminating against blacks, including those serving in the military.
Donald Trump furiously fought the civil rights suit in the courts and the media, but the Trumps eventually settled on terms that were widely regarded as a victory for the government. Three years later, the government sued the Trumps again, for continuing to discriminate.
In fairness, those suits date from long ago…
Yet even if Donald Trump inherited his firm’s discriminatory policies, he allied himself decisively in the 1970s housing battle against the civil rights movement.
Another revealing moment came in 1989, when New York City was convulsed by the “Central Park jogger” case, a rape and beating of a young white woman. Five black and Latino teenagers were arrested.
[I remember that case vividly.]
Trump stepped in, denounced Mayor Ed Koch’s call for peace and bought full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty.
[I remember those ads vividly.]
The five teenagers spent years in prison before being exonerated.
[I remember their exonerations vividly.]
As Trump moved into casinos, discrimination followed…
…
In 1991, a book by John O’Donnell, who had been president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, quoted Trump as criticizing a black accountant and saying: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. … I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control.” O’Donnell wrote that for months afterward, Trump pressed him to fire the black accountant, until the man resigned of his own accord.
…in a Playboy interview, he conceded “the stuff O’Donnell wrote about me is probably true.”
The recent record may be more familiar:…President Obama was born in Kenya;…Obama was admitted to Ivy League schools only because of affirmative action…Mexican immigrants [are], “in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists”; …temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States; …American-born judge of Mexican ancestry [is] a Mexican who cannot fairly hear his case;… reluctance to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan in a television interview;…81 percent of white murder victims are killed by blacks (the actual figure is about 15 percent); and so on.
… retweeted messages from white supremacists or Nazi sympathizers [and so on]
Trump repeatedly and vehemently denies any racism, and he has deleted some offensive tweets. The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi racist website that has endorsed Trump, sees that as going “full-wink-wink-wink.”
My view is that “racist” can be a loaded word, [Omg Kristof.] a conversation stopper more than a clarifier, and that we should be careful not to use it simply as an epithet. Moreover, Muslims and Latinos can be of any race, so some of those statements technically reflect not so much racism as bigotry. [Well, that's better.] It’s also true that with any single statement, it is possible that Trump misspoke or was misconstrued.
And yet. [And so on?]
Here we have a man who for more than four decades has been repeatedly associated with racial discrimination or bigoted comments about minorities, some of them made on television for all to see. While any one episode may be ambiguous, what emerges over more than four decades is a narrative arc, a consistent pattern — and I don’t see what else to call it but racism.
Serious? You're seriously having this conversation with yourself now, Mr. Kristof? You've missed all the wink-winks? Never heard all the tweet-tweet of the dog whistle?
OF COURSE HE'S A RACIST! HIS SUPPORTERS ARE RACISTS! THIS ENTIRE ELECTION HAS BEEN AND WILL CONTINUE TO BE ABOUT RACE!
