Cabinet nominees such as Ben Carson at HUD (“like picking Elmer Fudd to run NASA”) mean that prominent African-Americans need to advocate for their community: “Hope is not a strategy.”
Never before in modern history have we had a president-elect so ill-informed, ill-tempered, irrational and ill-equipped to deal with the major issues that face this country. The counterintuitive election of Donald Trump has left a lot of political pundits from both parties throwing up their hands, saying, “All we can do is hope for the best.” But as Mark Wahlberg’s character in Deepwater Horizon warns the British Petroleum executives ignoring the oil platform’s numerous problems right before it bursts into flames: “Hope is not a strategy.” And based on the political appointments and nominations Trump has recently made, people of color have little reason to be hopeful. That’s why it’s especially important over the next four years that black celebrities step up and take stances to give voice to those in the black community who will not be heard by the incoming administration. Given that the country is in the throes of a civil rights backlash that threatens to undo the progress we’ve fought so hard to attain, we have to be fearless and relentless in speaking up at every opportunity.
Trump’s selection of Jeff Sessions for U.S. Attorney General sends a clear message of where we stand. The guardian of equal justice will be a man who is accused of several acts of racism, including describing the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as “un-American.” Worse, though, are Trump’s transparent attempts to appear diverse. A quick look at two of the black faces that Trump parades on television as proof of the diversity of his entourage is actually evidence of his using black shills to distract us from his paternalistic policies to dismantle civil liberties for people of color, women, the LGBT community, Muslims and immigrants. The selection of Ben Carson as Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), with its $47 billion budget, continues Trump’s wave of choosing completely unqualified people to head important agencies crucial to addressing serious problems such as racial inequity and poverty. It’s like picking Elmer Fudd to run NASA. Carson may be a brilliant surgeon, but he has no understanding of the complexities of government and bureaucracies that make them work. That’s not only my opinion, it’s Carson’s, who in November admitted, through his spokesperson Armstrong Williams, that he wouldn’t accept a position in Trump’s cabinet because “he has no government experience; he’s never run a federal agency.” Still unclear is why he felt he wasn’t qualified for the cabinet yet was qualified to be president. Or what has changed in the two months since he felt unqualified to make him suddenly feel qualified.
More insidious is Carson’s war on Planned Parenthood based on his inaccurate belief that clinics were placed in black neighborhoods to control the black population. “Even today, the plurality of their clinics are in minority communities,” he told CNN. However, the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization, concluded that 60 percent of clinics are in majority-white neighborhoods. On Jan. 5, Republicans vowed to defund Planned Parenthood, an attempt to lessen women’s access to health care and remove their constitutional right to an abortion. This policy will have especially dire consequences in the poor black communities where people can’t afford alternatives that the affluent can.
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