NAACP congratulates Trump on victory but says 2016 ‘regularized racism’
The NAACP, whose convention President-elect Donald Trump refused to visit during the campaign, congratulated the billionaire businessman on his historic win, but not without noting — at least from its view — that 2016 “regularized racism” and “mainstreamed misogyny.”
“Even as we extend our congratulations to President-elect Donald J. Trump, the NAACP, as America’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, must bluntly note that the 2016 campaign has regularized racism, standardized anti-Semitism, de-exceptionalized xenophobia and mainstreamed misogyny,” the statement, which was released Wednesday, reads. “Voter suppression, as the courts have declared, has too become rampant and routine.”
Though NAACP President Cornell William Brooks — who called the president-elect “kind of Jim Crow with hairspray and a blue suit” earlier this year — is no fan of Trump, the association never actually accused the Republican candidate of being responsible for what they believe arose out of 2016.
Instead, the statement urges Trump to speak with “moral clarity,” decrying the “dog-whistle racial politics” that characterized the bruising election cycle:
During this critical period of transition, we are now calling upon the next president to speak and act with the moral clarity necessary to silence the dog-whistle racial politics that have characterized recent months and have left many of our fellow citizens snarling at one another in anger and even whimpering in fear. The more than 120 million Americans who cast ballots in this election – as well as the more than 100 million more eligible voters who declined to vote — deserve no less.
Toward the latter part of his campaign, Trump often described a bleak scene for black Americans, detailing communities that are “absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before.” Williams, for his part, called those comments “insulting.”
“Mr. Trump, for anyone to assert that the African-American community is in the worst shape ever, ever, ever, to say that, to assert that with a semi-straight face is to demonstrate an insulting degree of ignorance and/or insensitivity,” he told CNN in September.
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