The front of the National section in the New York Times took full advantage of President Trump’s vulgar comment about life in Africa, El Salvador, and Haiti to accuse him of racism, felicitously timed to appear on Martin Luther King Day. Reporter Sabrina Tavernise’s full-page article was headlined “In Trump’s Remarks, Black Churches See a Nation Backsliding.” (Notice the Times' sudden respect for religion when the target is right.)
The benevolent spirit of Barack Obama appeared early on:
On the day before Martin Luther King’s Birthday, African-American churchgoers gathered as they always do, to pray, give thanks and reflect on the state of race in America. But after a disheartening week and an even more disheartening year, black Americans interviewed on Sunday said they were struggling to comprehend what was happening in a country that so recently had an African-American president.
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In interviews at churches in Washington; Atlanta; Kansas City, Mo.; Miami; and Brockton, Mass., black Americans expressed frustration and disappointment about the direction of the country in Donald Trump’s first year in office.
They said they saw America slipping into an earlier, uglier version of itself. And when Mr. Trump used crude words to describe Haiti and African countries in an immigration discussion, they said, he was voicing what many Americans were thinking, even if it was something they no longer felt comfortable saying: America prefers white people.
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What emerged was a service that swerved between the past and the present, a renewed political reckoning and another denunciation of the president from one of the country’s most prominent black churches. Before a rapt crowd that included Dr. King’s only surviving sibling, Dr. Warnock accused Mr. Trump of trafficking in “hate speech” and described him as “willfully ignorant, racist, xenophobic.”
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Mr. Tucker said that perhaps the progress the civil rights movement had fought for had missed parts of the country. Maybe black progress had engendered more resistance than he had understood.
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Some say that Mr. Trump’s language is distracting from an important policy question that will affect millions of people. But church leaders said that made his remarks all the more inexcusable. Words matter all the more, they said, when they come from the mouth of the president.
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In Miami, Mr. Trump’s negative stereotyping of immigrants, especially Haitians, seemed to rankle most.
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“If you’re going to stereotype them, you should say they’re law-abiding, super ethical, warm and kind to strangers,” he said. “They want to thrive in this country, as I did, and become part of the American dream.”
Which makes it a bit of a shame that the Times thinks positive stereotyping of minority groups is racist as well.
