Claiming optimism will be hard to come by for African Americans, former Los Angeles Lakers legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar asserts America can’t unify under Donald Trump as president because the “home of the free” will now embrace “the leadership of a racist.”
Moreover, Jabbar worries not just for blacks but for “women, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, the LGBT community and others who now must walk through the streets of their country for the next four years in shame and fear.”
Jabbar writes in the Washington Post, “Trump represents the last wisp of the rich white plantation owner holding on to the glories of the past. His history of racism, from Justice Department lawsuits for housing discrimination to claim that Mexican heritage disqualified a federal judge, has already been well-documented.”
The NBA’s all-time leading scorer ignores the facts that black’s and minority groups have suffered during the present administration and that Mr. Trump’s economic agenda may help improve their financial condition. Poverty increased from 25.8 percent in 2009 to 27.2 percent in 2014, black attorney and nationally syndicated radio host Larry Elder points out in his Townhall article. “Minority households’ median income fell 9 percent between 2010 and 2013, compared to a drop of only 1 percent for whites,” Elder states. On top of that, he points to a Financial Times survey that found “The median non-white family today has a net worth of just $18,100 — almost a fifth lower than it was when Mr. Obama took office.”
That kind of back tracking doesn’t matter to the author of Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White. What concerns Jabbar is the condition of law enforcement in America. He argues that thanks to Black Lives Matter protests, and proselytizing by pro athletes, America was “finally acknowledging the overwhelming evidence of institutional racism that had been glaringly obvious to blacks for many years.”
Jabbar believes that acknowledgment will be erased now by “a majority of white America” who put Trump in office and now “as Morpheus explains in The Matrix, ‘wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.’”
It’s not the economy, fear of terrorism, or Washington gridlock that the majority of white America fears, Jabbar opines. What they “fear most is the changing shade of skin color of America.”
Jabar writes, “White America has rewarded his outrageous racism, misogyny, xenophobia and religious intolerance with a mandate to put those beliefs into policy. For African Americans, America just got a little more threatening, a little more claustrophobic, a lot less hopeful. We feel like disposable extras, the nameless bodies who are never part of the main cast.”
The long time leftist activist concludes that pop star Beyoncé in her song “Formation,” when she sings “I dream it, I work hard, I grind till I own it,” is a message our new president-elect can’t appreciate. But, Jabbar writes, “those words can inspire all African Americans and others who wish to make America America again. Not hope, but action. Not later, but now.”
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