For the eight percent of the African American population that voted for Donald Trump, your freedom and justice is on the line. Hiring Steve Bannon, an avowed anti-Semite and Klan sympathizer, and following it up with the appointment of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, who is such a racist that he could not secure a federal judgeship confirmation in 1986, Mr. Trump has made clear what you have lost. The reshaping of a whiter America has been on the mind of Sessions since he was a U.S. Attorney in the Reagan administration.
The speculation of a Muslim registry, by invoking the memory of Japanese internment camps as the precedent, is outrageous. The President -elect is demonstrating his absurd usage of authority even before he steps across the threshold of power. Just yesterday he, with his daughter at his side, met with the Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Besides the impropriety of having his daughter and son-in-law privy to any trade agreement talks or business negotiations that could affect the so-called blind trust his daughter will be heading, Trump is not above undermining the sitting President for his own amusement. Carl Higbie a Trump PAC spokesman tried to soften the Muslim registry question after using the internment camp analogy by saying it would not affect Muslims already here, just those from “suspect countries.” I may believe that had his boss not questioned the legitimacy of President Obama by using xenophobic language and labeling Mr. Obama a Muslim.
The obvious attempt to indict a religion for political gain was appalling.
This is a man who built his life on hatred an avarice; from being sued by the Nixon administration for housing discrimination in the seventies, to racial animosity in the eighties, with the Central Park Five, continuing with unconfirmed but numerous stories of not wanting Blacks to count his money or participate in his beauty pageants in the nineties. We are now in a new millennium and the beat goes on. I am an African American man in the twilight of my years who survived rioting in the streets following the MLKing Jr. assassination and watched breathlessly as racial tensions boiled over following the Rodney King travesty of injustice in Los Angeles.
All the things I wanted to leave behind, Emmett Till, Amadou Diallo, Trayvon Martin and Philando Castile amongst countless others, still haunt my dreams. So now I am forcibly faced with the question, “what do I have to lose?”
The answer is not just my loss, but the loss of dignity and respect by the world of nations. President Obama has long been accused of being an apologist for the United States, currently those apologies are warranted. The shining city on the hill, conservatives quote with such relish is dimming under the fog of Trump. The America that kept a light in the window for the rest of the world has once again been reduced to a groping, foul-mouthed, bigoted, combover mess.
Vote 2018, it is not too late.