Last week in Chicago, the National Association of Black Journalists held its annual convention. More than 4,000 journalists and aspiring journalists, a record number, gathered for workshops, panel discussions, job interviews and informal evenings of networking and mutual support.
Founded in 1975, NABJ, as it’s known affectionately to its members, has invited the presidential nominees of the two major parties to take questions at its election-year convention from its beginning as a fledgling organization with a few dozen members. The professional association has tax-exempt status as a nonpartisan nonprofit.
This year, because of an unusually late solidification of the presidential race, with President Joe Biden stepping out last month and endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, the new presumptive Democratic nominee was not available to appear at the convention.
The Republican party did not have the same scheduling challenges with the availability of its nominee. By the end of this political campaign, party leaders may wish they had.
Former president Donald Trump was his usual racist and confrontational self. He started out by unfairly attacking Rachel Scott from ABC News for her appropriate, tough first question that cited a litany of his past racist statements. Then he complained repeatedly about technical difficulties, which he claimed kept him waiting for 35 minutes.
This was the first NBJ conference I attended in more than 10 years. At a later session for publishers of Black-owned publications that I attended, it was revealed the main reason for the delay was that Trump’s aides initially refused to let him submit to the panel interview with three Black women journalists — unless NABJ dropped its plan to fact-check, in real time online, the lies and misinformation he consistently spews at his public events. NABJ leaders did not back down; it was Trump who relented.
Most Republican nominees have taken a pass on NABJ’s invitation, although Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2004 did appear. Why did Trump accept, knowing, as he had to, that he wasn’t walking into MAGA heaven? Because he’s been trying to win over more Black voters. And because if he cannot get their support, he’d like angry, fringe Black voters to sit this one out in November.
The latter is the reason Trump came up with his most bogus claim that Harris somehow is not Black. That is one of the most ridiculous claims I have heard in the whole list of exceedingly ridiculous statements that have come out of his mouth. But don’t be fooled by Trump and his weird claim about her racial identity.
Even if you are not a person of color and you don’t have any Black friends you can have an honest conversation with, all you need to do is sit down and watch one episode of “Finding Your Roots,” hosted by the learned Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., and you will understand that hardly any Black person in America has 100% African DNA, aside from recent immigrants from the continent.
It might be too much for Donald and his MAGA brain trust to figure out that Harris is both Black and Indian, born to a Jamaican immigrant father and Indian immigrant mother. She’s a graduate of historically Black Howard University, a member of historically Black Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc. and former member of the Congressional Black Caucus. She embraces the other side of her ancestry, too. She loves Indian food, for example. As the Trump campaign pointed out, she was once photographed in her youth wearing a sari. So what? One strand of her DNA does not cancel out the other.
Trump and his team appear befuddled about how to shift from their “he’s too old and feeble” strategy against Biden to another approach to a younger but experienced Democratic nominee who obviously has grown as a campaigner since her own failed run for president four years ago.
So Trump is flailing around. At the NABJ convention, he defaulted to his juvenile behavior of going ad hominem, attacking his opponent in personal terms.
Harris, speaking before a historically Black sorority different from her own in Houston, invoked a saying from African American vernacular speech: “If you’ve got something to say … say it to my face.” How about that, Donald Trump? That Black enough for you?
All evidence indicates that Black voters are lining up, enthusiastically, behind a woman who has the potential to become the country’s first Black and Asian woman president. Just look at the online fundraising done already by thousands of Black women and Black men, in separate online sessions, to help get out the vote.
Team Trump must be worried that Harris will reassemble Barack Obama’s winning coalition with a massive turnout of Black voters, young ones of all races and sensible suburbanites. The stakes are bigger this time. Had Obama lost either campaign, John McCain or Mitt Romney weren’t about to try to destroy the very essence of the country.
Make no mistake about it: Not only the future of America, but the future of the world, may hang in the balance on Election Day. Don’t get distracted or side-tracked by Trump’s foolishness.
