Just when you thought the madness of the 2016 presidential campaign couldn’t get anymore insane, guess what, it has.
Many people are probably aware of the comments made by Kathy Miller, volunteer chairwoman of GOP nominee Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in northeastern Ohio’s Mahoning County. In an interview with a reporter for The Guardian, Miller said that “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this. You know, I’m in the real estate industry. There’s none.”
As one can imagine, all hell broke loose in the bloggersphere. Social media went to town lambasting Miller like a roasted turkey for her out of touch comments. My reaction to her comments was: Lady, are you serious? Where the hell have you been all this time?
Miller, in fact, was just getting warmed up. She fancied herself calling out Black America further by saying: “If you’re Black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You had every opportunity; it was given to you. You had the benefits that White kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
The fact is that such comments are false, pitiful and woefully ignorant. It is the rhetoric of a pitifully ill-informed and clueless person. Just last week, the day after Miller made her inaccurate remarks, the Economic Policy Institute released a report conducted by Valerie Wilson and William M. Rodgers III that showed that Black-White wage gaps are larger today than they were in 1979 and that neither education or good intentions has managed to close this gap.
Does Miller actually believe that President Obama is responsible for Jim Crow, the lynchings and segregation that were the law of the land prior to 1964? If so, she and others who harbor a similar mindset are in a deep, funky level of cluelessness and denial bordering on the irredeemable. In regard to her comments that there was no racism in the 1960s, as a historian, I do not have time to discuss that one here. That is another entire column. I will limit my reaction to three words: yes there was!
On a related note, given the fact that she is in the real estate industry, surely Miller must be aware of redlining, banks refusing to grant conventional mortgages and insurance to predominantly Black neighborhoods, blockbusting, fearmongering and other antics that resulted in White flight and sizable profits for those agents who perversely and shamelessly exploited that situation.
