How Do Trump’s Black Friends Feel? It’s Complicated
How Do Trump’s Black Friends Feel? It’s Complicated
“I didn’t hide my race from Donald Trump. He knew,” Ms. Young said in a rare interview. “He would say, ‘You’re like Derek Jeter.’ And I would say, ‘Exactly.’”
“I never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race of people,” she added.
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How Do Trump’s Black Friends Feel? It’s Complicated
Beyond dating a biracial model, he made outsize efforts to hang out publicly with African-American celebrities: the boxing promoter Don King, the hip-hop impresarios Kanye West, Russell Simmons and Sean Combs, and celebrities as big as Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Michael Jackson.
But more than ever, the question is being asked: Is Mr. Trump personally racist?
The few African-Americans in his inner circle respond with an emphatic no. Most privately describe him as a 71-year-old man with fixed views and a cloistered history, raised in a heavily white enclave in Queens, who came of age and built a tower in the Manhattan sky when New York City was roiling with racial strife.
“Just because you’re a nationalist and you’re white doesn’t make you a white nationalist,” said Katrina Pierson, an African-American who was a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. “Putting Americans first makes you a nationalist and in that case, I’m a nationalist. I think we should take care of our families and our children first.”
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