Last week the National Association of Black Writers held their national conference in Chicago. As most of the world now knows Donald Trump agreed to be interviewed, live, at the conference. After watching the interview the only way I could describe it, it was a disaster. Right after watching the interview I asked my wife, “who in the hell is advising Trump and who in the hell is preparing him for these interviews?” He looked and sounded unprepared and he seemed to talk down to a very educated audience of Black Writers. When he started talking about how Kamala Harris had started indentifying as Black instead of Indian I almost fell off my chair. I thought that was just one big racist and ignorant thing to say. A week later I still think it was one big racist and ignorant thing to say. The fact he is telling these Black Journalists he has done most for the Blacks since Abraham Lincoln just tells me just how unprepared he was for the audience that he was talking to. I remember no ground breaking legislation or policies being passed by Trump that would compare to anything that Presidents like Johnson or Truman accomplished. The fact that things like gerrymandering are a staple of Republican voter’s suppression tactics shows you how little the Republicans have even wanted to hear the Black voices in the various states that have rampant gerrymandering. His audience was one that would know the actually history of the Black People in America and he should have known to outright lie to them would have brought a bad reaction.

It seems most of my adult life forms you fill out want to know the race that you are. As time goes on that is going to be more any more difficult. Interracial marriages were outlawed in places like Nazi Germany, Apartheid-era South Africa and up until 1968 in 31 of our 50 states in the United States. It wasn’t until the Supreme Court ruling, Loving vs. Virginia, did interracial marriages become legal in all 50 States. That is only 55 years ago so when baby boomers were growing up interracial relationships were never seen and rarely heard of. It was really easy to make that checkmark on an employment form about whether we were White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American because almost all of us fell into one of those categories. Today, not so much. Trump at the National Black Writer’s Association Conference complained how Kamala Harris was now identifying as Black when, in the past, he thought she had always identified as Indian. How can she get away with now being Black?, was his question, I think. To me that is an attitude of a man that is living in the past and refuses to change with the passing of time. As most of you know, Kamala Harris’s mother was from India and her father was Black, hailing from Jamaica. Of course this would make her 50% Black and 50% Indian. No matter what anyone thinks or how anyone wants to spin this she is both Black and Indian and has the right to Identify with both of her parents. To argue anything differently to me is either ignorant or racist. She went to a mostly Black College but grew up with her Indian mother so I think that she has always recognized the two worlds she has come from. It us Baby Boomers that grew up with segregation not only in our cities but also in our relationships that have a hard to acknowledging the different world that we live in today.  

Today we have young whole generation of people that have always seen interracial relationships and have not experienced the racial hatred that I witnessed in my youth.  In many of our cities you witness interracial relationships every day. Maybe that was what was so shocking to so many of us when they marched with torches in Charlotte chanting, “you will not replace us” because many of us had thought that we as a country had moved on from all the hatred of the past. After they watched that, you heard people say “that is not what we are”. Well, apparently that is exactly what some people are. Not everyone but still some and it is those some Trump is always speaking to. For others the idea of race means less and less to them. The question should be not what race we identify but what type of person that we want to be. I hope that someday those checkboxes of race are completely gone from everywhere.

Trump and his performance at the NBJA convention shows that racism is alive and well still in America and that we have a ways to go. Maybe Trump is too old to change and is not willing to admit it. You have to have more than just boastful statements, your statements have to be accompanied by bold actions to those boastful statements and that is what has been lacking in much of what Trump says. Has he ended Black voter suppression such as gerrymandering? Has he made it easier for Black people to vote? He never answered the question of why Black voters should vote for him. Instead he just threw up accusations that were meant to distract from his lack of support for Black America. I am 70 years old and even though there has been improvement in my lifetime the last decade there seems to have taken a couple of steps backwards during the four years under Trump. I don’t think before I die there will be the end of this nonsense. The color of one’s skin still means more than the contents of one’s heart to too many Americans today.

In Virginia City Nevada they had a festival called the Hot August Nights. A Black man who was attending the festival was greeted by a racial comment about a hanging tree and also being called the “N” word by a group that included people that were wearing MAGA hats. These references were all too common 60 years ago but you would hope we have moved beyond that. Sadly too many have not. This is still an all too common of a thing in much of America. If Trump had done more for the Blacks than Abraham Lincoln then why are some of his supporters such racists?