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Donald Trump’s Description of Black America Is Offending Those Living in It Donald Trump’s Description of Black America Is Offending Those Living in It
(about 4 hours later)
TAMPA, Fla. — Campaigning over the past week, Donald J. Trump has painted a bleak and dire picture of black America. ATLANTA — Demeitrus Williams has heard what Donald J. Trump has been saying recently about black people: That their neighborhoods were “war zones.” That they struggle to get by on food stamps. That they see nothing but failure around them.
African-Americans live in neighborhoods that resemble “war zones” more than cities, he has said. They struggle to get by on food stamps. Fewer and fewer of them own their own homes. And errant gunfire is a constant hazard. Mr. Williams, 61, a retired postal employee who is African-American, acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s remarks described a reality for some black people. But it was not his reality, or that of people he knew. And the fact those generalizations, in which all African-Americans inhabit a hell of violence and dysfunction, came as part of an outreach effort on Mr. Trump’s part elicited from Mr. Williams an incredulous and slightly bitter cascade of chuckles.
“You’ll be able to walk down the street without getting shot,” Mr. Trump told a crowd in Akron, Ohio, on Monday, saying how blacks’ lives would improve if he were president. “Right now you walk down the street, you get shot. Look at the statistics — we’ll straighten it out.” “Who’s he talking about?” Mr. Williams said Wednesday over lunch at Ponce City Market, an upscale development with a hip food court that draws an ethnically and racially mixed crowd. “I don’t know — most of the black people I know are educated and live in nice neighborhoods. Everybody in my family is required to have a degree.”
“Our inner cities are suffering like never before,” Mr. Trump said at a rally here on Wednesday. Dogged by suggestions that he has been running a racist campaign, Mr. Trump has been expressing concern for African-Americans more in the past week than at any other point in his presidential run, and making a direct appeal for their votes. “What do you have to lose?” he has asked.
Dogged by suggestions that he is running a racist campaign, Mr. Trump has been speaking about and expressing concern for black voters more in the past week than at any other point in his presidential run. But the unrelievedly dire picture he has painted of black America has left many black voters angry, dumbfounded or both. Interviews with roughly a dozen blacks here turned up no one who found any appeal in Mr. Trump’s remarks. More common was the suggestion that Mr. Trump was using the remarks to appeal to whites who might support him.
But he has been doing so in front of nearly all-white audiences. In Austin on Tuesday, a few blacks were seated behind Mr. Trump, where they would be seen on television during his speech. Otherwise, the crowd was predominantly white. “I hear him not talking to black people, but talking to white people about black people so they will think he cares about black people,” said Alexis Scott, a former publisher of The Atlanta Daily World, a black-owned newspaper. “The real thing that he’s trying to do is to try to protect some of the white vote by suggesting to them that he cares.”
Republican pollsters and strategists speculate that Mr. Trump’s newfound attention to blacks and inner-city conditions is aimed less at actually vying for African-American support than at softening his image among suburban whites who might otherwise be receptive to him but are loath to vote for someone seen as racist. Speaking invariably to almost all-white audiences, Mr. Trump has portrayed blacks as living lives of utter desperation. “What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?” he asked a crowd in Virginia on Saturday. “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?”
There are also cross-currents in Mr. Trump’s appeal. Even as he tries to talk about black voters in his speeches, he openly talks about the potential for voter fraud in areas of Pennsylvania that are heavily African-American. Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, said that black Americans faced challenges, but that Mr. Trump’s depiction of a hopeless, violent black America did not match reality.
And some African-Americans who have been listening say the picture Mr. Trump has been painting of black America — a nightmare of poverty, death and danger, brought about by failed Democratic policies and leadership — is unrecognizable. “It’s an inaccurate portrayal of the community that seeks to define the community by only its biggest challenges,” Mr. Morial said. “Black America has deep problems — deep economic problems — but black America also has a large community of striving, successful, hard-working people: college educated, in the work force.”
Marc H. Morial, the president of the National Urban League, said Mr. Trump’s depiction of a desperate, hopeless black America did not match reality. Poverty is far more prevalent in black households than the general population, but the vast majority of African-Americans do not live in poverty. According to census data released last year, 26 percent of blacks live in poverty, compared with 15 percent of the country as a whole. Only about one out of every four households receiving food stamps in 2014 was black, according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
“It’s an inaccurate portrayal of the community that seeks to define the community by only its biggest challenges,” Mr. Morial said. “Black America has deep problems — deep economic problems — but black America also has a large community of striving, successful, hard-working people: college-educated, in the work force.” One area where blacks lag severely is homeownership. Rates of homeownership for blacks have dipped over the past four years to 41.7 percent in the second quarter of this year, the lowest rate among any racial group, according to the Census Bureau. The unemployment rate for blacks is nearly double the national average.
Indeed, Mr. Trump’s description of urban decay can sound anachronistic — more applicable to the New York of the 1970s, when Mr. Trump first entered the world of real estate at his father’s side, or of the crack-plagued early 1990s, when he was a fixture of the city’s tabloids, than to most major cities today. Mr. Trump’s tone and strategy in courting the black vote is distinctly different from those pursued by previous Republican presidential nominees, whose more formal outreach efforts had limited success. In 2004, for instance, President George W. Bush addressed the National Urban League, and in 2012, Mitt Romney appeared before the N.A.A.C.P.
“You could go to war zones in countries that we’re fighting, and it’s safer than living in some of our inner cities,” Mr. Trump said in Akron. “Someone like George W. Bush, to his credit, actually went to black audiences with people who had real connections to black communities,” said Matthew B. Platt, a political scientist at historically black Morehouse College. “He actually made those kinds of connections to then filter down to regular black people. Trump is not doing anything of that sort.”
His sales pitch can also sound bluntly dismissive. But he noted that Mr. Trump’s basic presentation to black voters was perhaps not altogether different from the one he has made to white voters.
“What do you have to lose by trying something new, like Trump?” he asked a crowd in Virginia on Saturday. “You’re living in your poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed — what the hell do you have to lose?” “It seems to me that Trump’s argument is this: ‘Your life sucks. Try something new. I’m something new,’” he said. “That’s the argument he’s making to black voters and, more broadly, that’s the entire Trump campaign.”
Mr. Trump would seem to have nowhere to go but up among African-American voters. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Hillary Clinton with a 91 percent to 1 percent advantage over Mr. Trump among blacks. His credibility problems with blacks stem in part from his role in leading the so-called birther movement that questioned President Obama’s birthplace, an attempt to delegitimize Mr. Obama’s presidency that offended great numbers of African-Americans. Mr. Trump would seem to have nowhere to go but up among African-American voters. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found Hillary Clinton with a 91 to 1 percent advantage over Mr. Trump among blacks. Many say Mr. Trump’s role in leading the so-called birther movement that questioned President Obama’s birthplace doomed his chances with African-American voters.
On Tuesday, the Clinton campaign seized on Mr. Trump’s new language toward minority groups, hosting a press call with black Democrats in Congress who criticized Mr. Trump’s approach as bigoted, exploitative and “too little, too late.” “Social media and YouTube have a record of what he’s said in the last year, much less the last five or six years,” said Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist, who is black. “You can’t just make one speech, have a good week and then all of a sudden think people are going to forget everything you’ve done.”
Jason Miller, Mr. Trump’s spokesman, did not respond to an email seeking comment. Nor did Omarosa Manigault, the former “Apprentice” star who is a top adviser to the campaign on African-American issues. Some black conservatives, however, defended Mr. Trump. Wayne Dupree, a radio host, posted a live video to Periscope, an app that allows users to live-stream video, saying that Mrs. Clinton had been tricking black people for years. He urged blacks to look at the conditions they were living under.
Elon James White, the founder and editor in chief of the website This Week in Blackness who is a frequent critic of Mrs. Clinton, said Mr. Trump was trying to co-opt the left’s arguments against her, but in such a cartoonish way that it would not work. “Look to the left, look to the right and look in front of you and tell me if things haven’t changed,” he said. “Then why do you keep voting for the Democratic Party? Why do you keep voting for the same side?”
“He doesn’t understand that people aren’t stupid, and they can clearly see what he’s doing and saying,” Mr. White said. “Whether or not I have an issue with how Democrats have dealt with the black community, or with Hillary, I’m still not stupid.” He urged blacks to help get Mr. Trump “elected so that we can change America.”’
Mr. Morial, of the Urban League, noted that the group had invited Mr. Trump to attend briefings on its policy concerns, but that he had declined. “America needs to go a different route,” Mr. Dupree said.
“The idea that the entire community is in poverty, you’ve got 25 percent of the entire community that’s in poverty?” Mr. Morial said incredulously. “You do have broken schools, but have you seen the Olympics? Have you seen Congress?” The Trump campaign rejected criticism with a statement from Lynne Patton, a black woman who is an assistant to the Trump family, accusing Democrats of treating black voters as a “monolith.”
In Atlanta on Wednesday, Nate Cohen, 35, a health care information technology worker, was among the African-Americans unimpressed by Mr. Trump’s efforts.
Mr. Cohen’s most generous interpretation was that perhaps Mr. Trump had not done his homework. Perhaps he needed to hit the streets and see the variety of the black experience. “I don’t recall ever seeing him going out into those hedges and highways,” he said. “You can’t just go on what you see on TV.”
Certainly, he said, some live in dire poverty. Mr. Cohen’s side job is as a motivational speaker, work that takes him to troubled neighborhoods. But he said blacks and Latinos were not the only people living in such conditions.
He said he had tried to give Mr. Trump a fair hearing, but had been turned off to him long ago. He said Mr. Trump will say “warped” things — like proposing to bar Muslims from entering the country or deporting all illegal immigrants — and then say things to “patch it up.”
He wondered whether Mr. Trump was appealing to whites, reinforcing stereotypes about blacks. “You’ve got to be mindful of who you affect, and who you infect,” he said, adding that Mr. Trump might be “infecting” his white audience with racist ideas.
Or as Ms. Scott put it: “He is giving voice to every stereotype he’s ever heard. I heard someone say, ‘It’s like he only watches “The Wire,” and that’s what he knows about black people.’”
At Six Feet Under, a seafood restaurant popular among blacks and whites, Anthony Simpson, 55, said he had heard Mr. Trump’s comments, but paid them little mind. He said he had long dismissed Mr. Trump as “a joke.”
Mr. Simpson, who owns a demolition business, said he was not surprised that Mr. Trump had offended many black people, after the things he had said about Muslims and Latinos.
“He eventually was going to get around to it,” he said.