Washington: There's a bit of head-scratching going on over what the Trump campaign claims is its outreach to African Americans – the candidate pranced through the primaries with convicted rapist and boxing champion Mike Tyson on his arm; and when he steps out these days, boxing promoter Don King, who was convicted of manslaughter in 1966, is at his side.
Throw in the fact that Trump seemingly goes out of his way to make his biggest pitches for black votes before predominantly white audiences in predominantly white communities, and perhaps the suspicion of some analysts is well placed – far from engaging in a near futile bid to woo African Americans, the vast majority of whom are rusted-on Democrats, Trump's objective is to convince undecided white voters that he's a caring, inclusive kind of guy.
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Trump renews call for 'stop and frisk'
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump renewed his call for so-called 'stop and frisk' policies, a tactic rival Hillary Clinton said was 'unconstitutional.'
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato revealed the enormity of Trump's task in an August tweet – "Trump polls 1-2% among blacks. In '64 Goldwater got 6% after voting no on the Civil Rights Act. In '68 segregationist George Wallace won 3%."
Rated as a genuine appeal for black votes, Trump is making a hash of it – some polls actually measure his support among blacks at zero.
That's hardly surprising, given that while he pleads for black votes, Trump also flirts with white supremacists and his campaign is infused with the white nationalist sympathies of the Breitbart media machine.
As a New York landlord, Trump was booked by the Justice Department over racist tenanting policies in the 1970s. And he was spear carrier-in-chief for the birther movement, which sought to delegitimise the presidency of the first African American to hold the office, by keeping alive a racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii.
The Trump campaign is not especially well informed on the interior of black America.
There were just 18 African-American delegates at the Republican convention in July, reportedly the smallest contingent in more than a century. And in Ohio, one of his local campaign officials flummoxed a reporter from The Guardian with this observation: "I don't think there was any racism till Obama got elected."
Americans with a racist bent celebrate Trump for, as one analyst observed, "his willingness to spit in the face of social pieties – the 'pieties' in question being, not coincidentally, the belief that non-white people are actually equal to white people".
Much of Trump's complaining that the election is "rigged" is heard as a coded charge that blacks are behind the electoral fraud that Republicans claim is rampant – but which is virtually non-existent in the US; and his calls for a national implementation of New York's outlawed "stop-and-frisk" program is read as a prescription for punishing all of black America.
Just as Trump's racist streak led him to believe he was entitled to stop and frisk the President of the US for his papers, he confirmed it further in the first of the presidential candidates' debates on Monday – all self-congratulations and tough-talking merely for abiding by the law in not discriminating against African Americans at his club in Palm Beach, Florida. And as though it was not possible with mixed membership, Trump gave himself another slap on the back – "and it's a tremendously successful club!"
In the context of the birther nonsense and racial healing, debate moderator Lester Holt attempted to ask Trump a question – "What do you say to Americans, people of colour …"
And that was as far as he got, when Trump seemingly had something to say, but then shut it down: "Well, it was very – I say nothing."
A well-intentioned presidential candidate seeking black support would be seen at the annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People – Trump was a no-show this year; and at gigs like the Black Women's Agenda Symposium Workshop and the national convention of black and Hispanic journalists – he wasn't at either.
In all that Trump says to African Americans, the tone is a paternalistic; there's an implicit "hey, idiot …" And after his black-themed speeches in Washington County, Wisconsin (96 per cent white), and Eaton County, Michigan (88 per cent white), his former wingman Corey Lewandowski told CNN that Trump felt unsafe going into black communities.
The candidates have starkly differing views of life for African Americans.
Hillary Clinton acknowledges that structural racism and implicit bias cause many measures of wellbeing for blacks to lag those for whites – but she also celebrates "vibrancy" and acknowledges optimism and talent, ambition and success in black communities.
By contrast, a good number of African Americans don't recognise Trump's Hollywood-esque, apocalyptic depiction of life in their communities – "living in hell", "you walk down the street, you get shot".
Without nuance, Trump caricatures their many and varied communities as a single black entity that is riven by crime and poverty, as jobless, rough and shiftless, in which the few who are law-abiding cower in basements as the majority indulge in rioting, looting and arson.
Murdering the English language as he does, Trump made one of those very weird pitches for black votes to a white audience in Akron, Ohio, in August: "And I ask you this, I ask you this – crime, all of the problems – to the African Americans, who I employ so many, so many people, to the Hispanics, tremendous people: What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance. I'll straighten it out. I'll straighten it out. What do you have to lose?"
To which a chorus-like response came back from many African Americans – "Everything!"
Trump offends African Americans on two levels – One, his absurd claim that "our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before" denies a brutal, 200-plus-year history of slavery, a more recent denial of civil and human rights and the cruel crack epidemic of the 1970s and 1980s; and two, his bleak Dickensian depiction of their lives denies the success of a growing and educated black middle class who contribute at all levels of society – from the presidency down.
A CNN run-through of statistics proves the nonsense of Trump's blind spot:
- The current rate of black deaths by white cops pales against the lynching of blacks in the past – 3318 such deaths between 1882 and 1931.
- In 2015, 32.7 per cent of children were in families living below the poverty line – less than half the 65.6 per cent recorded in 1965.
- The recent shooting of an unarmed black man in Tulsa was horrible, but in 1921, marauding white mobs, some dropping dynamite from airplanes, killed scores of black people – some estimates range up to 300 – in Tulsa's Greenwood neighbourhood. More than 6000 blacks were detained by authorities – for their own protection.
- Obama took some pleasure in correcting Trump who, he said, must have missed the civics lesson about slavery and Jim Crow.
Suggesting Trump take himself along to Washington's new museum of African-American history, the black President lectured the rich, white guy: "It's unrealistic to think that somehow [the impact of historic discrimination] just completely went away, because the Civil Rights Act was passed or because Oprah's making a lot of money or because I was elected president.
"You know, that's not how society works. And if you have hundreds of years of racial discrimination, it's likely that the vestiges of that discrimination linger on – and we should acknowledge that and own that."
In Tennessee, Yollander Hardway, who heads the Democratic Women of Shelby County, was indignant.
Making the point that the wretched existence described by Trump was alien to the vast majority of African Americans, she said: "It ignores all the blacks who have made very strong contributions to this country – if you follow his way of thinking, if all of us need help because we're in these dire straits, it means those people who have done heart transplants, black astronauts, people who fought for this country, teachers, professors … it ignores a large segment of black leaders."
Citing national polls that show support for Clinton at 90-plus per cent, Trymaine Lee, an African-American reporter for NBC, explores speculation that Trump's black overtures are not aimed at blacks – but at college-educated whites.
With Trump ahead among non-college-educated whites and Clinton holding a seven-point lead among college-educated whites nationally, Lee writes: "The theory goes that many educated white voters, who tend to be less socially conservative than their less-educated counterparts, may be turned off by the perception that Trump's rhetoric on a number of issues appears racist or bigoted, etc – by showing that he's reaching out to blacks, Trump may be trying to make some white voters more comfortable with him."
Occasional black voices rise in support of Trump. In August, New Yorker Jamie Douglas challenged The Atlantic's criticism of Trump's black outreach. Douglas said Democrat-fostered "victimisation" had held African Americans back.
"My parents and the other black West Indians who flooded into New York in the '60s and '70s came with little more than the clothes on their back. In a fairly short amount of time, however, they had already exceeded the achievements of the native black population. Similar things can be said about the Nigerians who came to the US during those years. Same genetic stock, different mindset, different results."
While Douglas acknowledged the political expediency of Trump attempting to drive a wedge between black and brown voters, he accepted as truth the argument that illegal migration had "badly hurt the employment prospects and cultural standing of black Americans – I cannot see how any serious person could argue otherwise".
Blogging at Vox.com, Dara Lind drills down further. Lighting on big minority communities around the country, she writes: "It's only with African Americans that Trump is even gesturing towards outreach. Donald Trump isn't talking to Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan. He's not talking to Latinos in Phoenix, Arizona, or in Hazleton, Pennsylvania …"
Her point is this: "You don't have to think that Trump isn't a racist to believe that, at some level, he and his campaign think they ought to be able to unite white and black voters against Latinos, Muslim Americans and the 'immigrant' threat."
If successful, such a gambit would deliver a Trump coalition that for Lind is unimaginable – African-American workers conclude that because immigrants are taking jobs that are rightfully theirs and because immigrant-fueled terrorism is a real threat to their safety, they should make common cause with "downwardly-mobile whites, [and demand] a more generous welfare state for native-born Americans and tougher immigration enforcement to keep everyone else out".
But writing in The Washington Post, Janell Ross tears into Trump after one of his outreach efforts: "[His] speech seemed built on an assumption that black voters are either easily fooled or easily led in new directions.
"It was devoid of any acknowledgement of Republican policies … that have fostered black poverty – crumbling schools and public infrastructure, the movement of jobs away from public transit routes and tax policy decisions that have left entire generations unable to access the easiest route to the middle class once available to at least most white Americans."
Holding the black vote is not all beer and skittles for Clinton. That she'll win the vote is not in doubt, but by how much and in which states?
Former president Bill Clinton is joked about for still believing he was America's "first black president". But coming in the wake of Obama, Hillary Clinton struggles to hold on to his coalition – and in swing states like Florida, there are reports of Democratic activists hitting the panic button for what Politico calls "an all-out blitz to juice-up voter enthusiasm".
Support is good; turnout is vital. Given Trump's limited paths to victory, he can't afford to lose Florida, but in early September Clinton's four-point lead in the Real Clear Politics average of polls for the state evaporated almost overnight – now she finds herself neck-and-neck with Trump.
And here's the calculus that worries her campaign in a slew of swing states, and especially in Florida:
In 2012, Obama won Florida by a margin of slightly more than 74 000 among 8.5 million votes cast. Obama garnered 95 per cent support among the state's 1.7 million African Americans; but Clinton is polling at less than 85 per cent support in the same demographic – which would leave her about 170,000 votes short of Obama's winning tally.
In South Florida, Leslie Wimes, who heads the Democratic African-American Women's Caucus, told Politico: "They have a big problem because they thought Obama and Michelle saying, 'Hey, go vote for Hillary,' would do it. But it's not enough."
Explaining that the black vote in Florida tilted more anti-Trump than it did pro-Clinton, she underscored Clinton's enthusiasm deficit: "In the end we don't vote against somebody – we vote for somebody."