Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Trump has no credibility with black voters
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says Donald Trump’s pitch to African-American voters won’t resonate in the black community unless the Republican nominee actually visits one.
“If he’s going to change hearts and minds in African-American communities, he needs to go there and talk to African-Americans,” Abdul-Jabbar told Yahoo News on Tuesday. “He hasn’t done that.”
Last week, Trump argued that Democrats have taken black voters for granted and that those voters should vote for him.
“You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs,” Trump said Friday at a rally in Dimondale, Mich., a predominantly white suburb. “What the hell do you have to lose?”
In a speech in Charlotte, N.C., the night before, the real estate mogul appealed to African-Americans to “give Donald Trump a chance.”
“The result for them will be amazing,” he said. “What do you have to lose by trying something new?”
Like other critics, Abdul-Jabbar noted to Yahoo News that Trump’s speeches were in heavily white cities.
“Those speeches were delivered in front of a basically all-white audience,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “I don’t know what he was trying to do with that.”
The 69-year-old NBA legend and author said the only 2016 Republican candidate he saw make an effort to talk directly to the black community about solutions to systemic problems like poverty and racism was Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
“He’s the only one who had any credibility as far as I was concerned,” Abdul-Jabbar said of Paul. “They don’t come to the black community to talk about the solutions because they don’t have any.”
Abdul-Jabbar, a Hillary Clinton supporter who spoke at last month’s Democratic National Convention, said that a lot of progress has been made on race relations under President Barack Obama.
“But there’s also been a retrenchment by some people who have a nostalgia for the time when all our faces in our government were white,” he said. “That fear of change has caused some of them to move things backwards. I think that’s what Mr. Trump is talking about when he says, ‘Let’s make America great again.’ I think he wants it to look like it did in the ’40s and ’50s.”
The former Los Angeles Lakers center has long been a vocal critic of Trump.
In September, Abdul-Jabbar — whose new book, “Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White,” was published Tuesday — penned an op-ed for the Washington Post critical of Trump’s attacks on reporters.
In response, he received a handwritten note from the GOP presidential hopeful.
“Now I know why the press always treated you so badly,” Trump wrote. “They couldn’t stand you. The fact is that you don’t have a clue about life and what has to be done to make America great again! Best wishes.”
“I basically crumpled it up,” Abdul-Jabbar recalled Tuesday. “This is what you would expect from somebody with that type of ego and someone who is so narcissistic and feels so self-important.”
He added: “If I’m that thin-skinned, I can’t write. So I keep writing.”
