Trump’s speech pits Black America against immigrants- it’s all divide and conquer

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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January 16, 2019

By: Natasha S. Alford

Tom Pennington/Getty Images

When then-candidate Donald Trump first uttered “Look at my African-American over there,” he put Black America on notice. As much as many members of the GOP claim to hate identity politics, politicians like Trump use it when they see fit.

From cheap red hat publicity stunts with the once-revolutionary music artist, Kanye West, to parading Omarosa as his token representative to “the Blacks” (until she inconveniently became a “dog” to him), Trump appeals to Black America when it’s beneficial to him.

Study after study shows that Trump manipulates facts to his advantage. Here’s the truth: According to Reuters, Black unemployment rates hit a record low in May 2018, the lowest since 1972.

Trump has done nothing magical or revolutionary for Black people by boosting jobs in the mining industry for example. Many of the jobs which are held up as being “stolen” from Blacks and Latinos by immigrants are low-wage, low-skill jobs. But rather than fix the structural racism that keeps Black people (and men in particular) overrepresented in low-wage jobs, it’s much easier to ask Black Americans to turn against “illegal” immigrants who are likely doing jobs we wouldn’t want to do.

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