The sister journalists, particularly Rachel Scott of ABC News, did a good job of challenging Donald Trump when he showed up at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Chicago.
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The former president and current Republican nominee was his usual racist blathering self, unfairly attacking Scott for her appropriately tough first question and repeatedly complaining about technical difficulties. As a sometime member going back to NABJ’s earliest years, I know there are many of its professional members who know how to produce a broadcast. But whoever did the set up were not working in their home studio. Give ‘em a break.
What Trump was saying, between the lines, is Black journalists don’t know what they’re doing, they’re inferior—lies I resent and know to be untrue. My nearly 50 years of experience and associating with other Black journalists says so.
Scott, who moderated the panel of three Black women questioners, deserves credit for maintaining her cool as she challenged the half-truths and outright lies Trump spouted. She often called him “Sir” even as she corrected his misstatements again and again.
The big news was Trump questioning the racial identity of Vice President Kamala Harris. Yo, Donald, that’s not for you to decide. It might be too much for your small mind to figure out that she’s both Black and Indian, but she’s lived in the Black world, as a Howard graduate, AKA and former member of the Congressional Black Caucus. When I met her in 2006, she told me her mother was Indian and her father Black. Then the district attorney in San Francisco, she had come all the way across the country to attend a conference organized by Black graduate students at Harvard.
Trump’s appearance was in keeping with NABJ’s tradition, as a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, of inviting both major party nominees to its convention in an election year. Most Republicans have taken a pass. So why did Trump show up, knowing he wasn’t walking into MAGA heaven? Because he’s trying to peel off some Black voters or give them a reason stay home on Election Day. That’s why he made his bogus comments about her race. He knows if Black voters turn out in massive numbers, as they did for Barack Obama, he’s most likely going to lose. To a Black woman. Don’t go for the okey doke. She’s sure enough Black.
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