{"id":41267,"date":"2017-08-18T05:10:34","date_gmt":"2017-08-18T05:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=41267"},"modified":"2017-08-18T05:10:50","modified_gmt":"2017-08-18T05:10:50","slug":"circling-the-square-of-president-trumps-relationship-with-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/politics\/circling-the-square-of-president-trumps-relationship-with-race.html","title":{"rendered":"Circling the Square of President Trump’s Relationship With Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

Circling the Square of President Trump’s Relationship With Race<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Circling the Square of President Trump’s Relationship With Race:- Kara Young, a model who dated Donald J. Trump for two years before he married another model named Melania Knauss, remembers clearly bringing up her race with the real estate tycoon early in their relationship. As with so many issues, he steered the conversation to celebrity.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t hide my race from Donald Trump. He knew,\u201d Ms. Young said in a rare interview. \u201cHe would say, \u2018You\u2019re like Derek Jeter.\u2019 And I would say, \u2018Exactly.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race of people,\u201d she added.<\/span><\/p>\n

The furor that Mr. Trump has created with his equivocation over the violence this weekend at a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., has refocused attention on the president\u2019s relationship with matters of race. Long before he embarked on his improbable political career, he had courted racial controversy, calling for the death penalty for five black and Latino teens who were later shown to have been wrongly convicted of a rape in Central Park, settling a Justice Department suit that charged the family business with housing discrimination and falsely accusing the nation\u2019s first black president of being born in Kenya.<\/span><\/p>\n

Beyond dating a biracial woman, he made outsize efforts to hang out publicly with African-American celebrities: the boxing promoter Don King, the hip-hop impresarios Kanye West, Russell Simmons and Sean Combs, and celebrities as big as Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Michael Jackson.<\/span><\/p>\n

But more than ever, the question is being asked: Is Mr. Trump personally racist?<\/span><\/p>\n

The few African-Americans in his inner circle respond with an emphatic no. Most privately describe him as a 71-year-old man with fixed views and a cloistered history, raised in a heavily white enclave in Queens, who came of age and built a tower in the Manhattan sky when New York City was roiling with racial strife.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cJust because you\u2019re a nationalist and you\u2019re white doesn\u2019t make you a white nationalist,\u201d said Katrina Pierson, an African-American who was a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump\u2019s presidential campaign. \u201cPutting Americans first makes you a nationalist and in that case, I\u2019m a nationalist. I think we should take care of our families and our children first.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development and the only African-American in Mr. Trump\u2019s cabinet, said while on a trip to Louisiana on Monday that the controversy over Mr. Trump\u2019s statements on the violence in Charlottesville were \u201clittle squabbles\u201d that were \u201cbeing blown out of proportion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe have got to begin to think more logically and stop trying to stir up controversy and start concentrating on the issues that really threaten us and threaten our children,\u201d Mr. Carson said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Critics see a man who has viewed African-Americans as tools for his personal advancement. The Democratic National Committee on Thursday distributed a litany of past offenses, under the headline \u201cTrump\u2019s Very Long History of Racism.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThere was never any engagement that would be mutually beneficial. It was someone hiring you to entertain them and make them money,\u201d said the Rev. Al Sharpton, with whom Mr. Trump was friendly at various points as they both came up as characters in the New York City tabloids.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe has made a deliberate choice to not be inclusive and to be racially exclusive,\u201d said Mr. Sharpton, now a fierce critic of the president. \u201cHe has nobody black, at all, in his inner circle.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Others see a much more complicated social life, less exclusionary than exclusive, infatuated with celebrity of all colors but personally close to few people, regardless of background. Abe Wallach, a former Trump Organization executive, said Mr. Trump is colorblind when it comes to keeping people at bay.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cForget black friends \u2014 he doesn\u2019t have any friends,\u201d said Mr. Wallach, who left on poor terms with Mr. Trump after a history of credit card theft. \u201cHe\u2019s actually a lonely man.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump does have a small handful of close friends, but most are people he has done business with over the years. At one point, he gave free office space to Jesse Jackson\u2019s Rainbow PUSH Coalition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Young, while adamant in her defense of Mr. Trump, did discount his elbow-rubbing with the black celebrity class as an indication of his open-mindedness.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s definitely easier to be with your own kind. It\u2019s easier for everybody, so if someone is super, super special and super, super interesting you can take them out,\u201d Ms. Young said. \u201cI think it was very interesting to him to meet and hang out with Russell Simmons and meet Sean Combs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But when asked whether she thought Mr. Trump was racist or supported white supremacist ideals, Ms. Young said, \u201cThat was not my experience.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Young was among the few African-Americans to be personally close to the real estate developer and reality television star.<\/span><\/p>\n

She dated Mr. Trump nearly 20 years ago, but Ms. Young, whose mother is black and whose father is white, recalled a man with limited understanding of other cultures. He didn\u2019t talk much about race or racial history, she said, but he had a curious racial awareness and a propensity for stereotypes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe went to the U.S. Open once, and a lot of black people came because it was Venus and Serena,\u201d she said, referring to the Williams sisters. \u201cHe was impressed that a lot of black people came to the U.S. Open because they were playing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Black people, he seemed to think, did not watch tennis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Young, who would not give her age but said she was roughly two decades younger than Mr. Trump, began dating him around 1997. Mr. Trump spotted Ms. Young at a party in the Hamptons and later asked someone for her number and called her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their pairing made headlines, after Ms. Young was reported to have left her then-boyfriend, a celebrity reporter named A.J. Benza, for Mr. Trump, a fact that Mr. Trump boasted of on talk radio.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA.J. doesn\u2019t like Trump for one reason: I stole his girlfriend. I took her away like he was a dog,\u201d Mr. Trump told his friend, the radio shock jock Howard Stern.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Young said she had watched the fallout from Charlottesville and was \u201chorrified\u201d by his comments putting white supremacists and counterprotesters on the same plane.<\/span><\/p>\n

She despaired over the racial landscape in the country and her former boyfriend\u2019s stoking of tensions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s horrifying what happened at the rally,\u201d Ms. Young said. \u201cI think it\u2019s crazy, and I think it\u2019s sad that this is where our country is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Lynne Patton, who heads the Department of Housing and Urban Development\u2019s New York and New Jersey office and is black, said Mr. Trump had a diverse set of people around him that included some close African-American associates, like Mr. Carson and Omarosa Manigault-Newman, a White House aide.<\/span><\/p>\n

The president \u201cdoesn\u2019t see color the way the average person does,\u201d she said. He assesses people based on \u201ctheir successes and their failures.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ms. Pierson said she was proof that Mr. Trump was not a racist because as soon as he decided to run for president, he hired her as a national spokeswoman for his campaign and encouraged her to speak on multiple television networks.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA racist does not pick a single black mother to represent his entire freaking presidential campaign,\u201d Ms. Pierson said. \u201cA racist would not endorse Jesse Jackson\u2019s presidential campaign in the \u201980s twice. A racist would also not spend his time and his resources to bring African-Americans into Wall Street.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Wallach recalled Mr. Trump telling a colleague at the company to apologize to Mr. Wallach for an anti-Semitic comment once.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe judges people by what kind of deal he can make with them,\u201d Mr. Wallach said. \u201cThat\u2019s his god.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/08\/17\/us\/politics\/trump-blacks-african-americans-girlfriend-charlottesville.html<\/span><\/p>\n

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