(Taylor Media Services) – Is billionaire and potential Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump a closet racist?
Prominent African-Americans, including television host Whoopi Goldberg, comedian/activist Bill Cosby and civil rights movement veteran Jesse Jackson may be beginning to think so. They accuse Trump of having employed crude and unfair stereotypes in his recent suggestions that President Barack Obama was not born in America and was not academically qualified to attend an Ivy League college.
Rev. Jackson told Politico last week that Trump was using racist “code” words and tapping into “racial fears” in his recent attacks on Obama. The criticism of Trump has become so sharp that he felt it necessary to respond to the charges of being a possible racist. He told TMZ.com “I am the last person that such a thing should be said about.” He cited a record of racial sensitivity and inclusion.
Nevertheless, in the past, Trump has actually been accused of racial insensitivity by former co-workers and employees. In a 1991 book, for example, the former president of Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino John O’Donnell says Trump once criticized a Black accountant saying “laziness is a trait in Blacks.” According to O’Donnell, he also said he did not like the idea of “Black guys counting my money. I hate it.”
Just recently Trump came in for criticism because of the phrasing he used in response to a question about his relationship with African-Americans. The real estate mogul said he had a great relationship with “the Blacks.” The former head of the New Jersey NAACP Walter Fields told Capital New York that Trump’s phrasing was “highly offensive.”
Trump has partied with Black entertainment figures including hip-hop mogul P. Diddy and performer Lenny Kravitz and once hosted an NAACP convention party. But he also angered many Blacks in 1989 when several Black youth were accused of raping a white female jogger in New York’s Central Park. Trump took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the Black teenagers. However, all the teens were later exonerated and New York police were accused of forcing phony confessions out of them.
