FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS | FCNP.COM
NATI O NA L
Abdul-Jabbar Defends Kaepernick
Among professional basketball’s most memorable “big men,” the likes of Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Shaquille O’Neal, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ranks as by far the most graceful, featuring a deadlyaccurate hook shot that was poetry in motion and indefensible. During his amazing athletic career, he led the UCLA Bruins to three consecutive NCAA championships (1967-69), each time being named the national college player of the year, and he went on to play 20 years in the professional National Basketball Association, scoring over 38,000 points, named the league’s Most Valuable Player six times and leading his team to five NBA championships before retiring in 1989. Now, Abdul-Jabbar has carried his talent and grace under fire far beyond his storied athletic career. He has become an FALLS CHURCH NEWS-PRESS articulate Muslim American spokesman whose role could not be more important in these times as an advocate for reason, sanity and justice in the face of roiling racial and religious tensions sparked by recent cases of video-taped discriminatory and deadly police violence against African-Americans and a presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who is inciting the lowest prejudices in the population against Muslims and almost all other non-white male segments of the U.S. population. (Thanks to a lazy, cowardly and immoral major media, Trump has by and large been able to mask his ties to white supremacist and other racist groups by preemptively charging his opponent, Hillary Clinton, with “bigotry.” This groundless bit of name-calling has served to permit the media to assert a non-existent “moral equivalency.” Trump has a lengthy, documented dossier of ties to hate groups, cited in detail by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Clinton has nothing but an incendiary charge by her opponent. But the media blithely calls this a moral equivalency. Not just Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, but leading media talking heads like Wolf Blitzer, Chuck Todd and Andrea Mitchell have failed their profession and the American people in this way. And CNN’s insistence on maintaining the disreputable former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski as a paid commentator is like forcing these people to choke on their own verbal excrement.) But this week the Washington Post provided op-ed space to AbdulJabbar to weigh in on the controversy swirling around National Football League player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to remain seated during the playing of the U.S. national anthem at the start of a game last weekend. Abdul-Jabbar quoted Kaepernick, “There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust (that) people aren’t being held accountable for. And that’s something that needs to change.” Abdul-Jabbar wrote, “Patriotism isn’t just getting teary-eyed on the Fourth of July or choked up at war memorials. It’s supporting what the Fourth of July celebrates and what those war memorials commemorate: The Constitution’s insistence that all people should have the same rights and opportunities and that it is the obligation of the government to make that happen. When the government fails in those obligations, it is the responsibility of patriots to speak up and remind it of its duty.” He added, “What makes an act truly patriotic and not just lip service is when it involves personal risk or sacrifice,” when “inspiring others is more important than personal cost,” and noted the significant risks of personal and professional loss that Kaepernick has been willing to take. The knee-jerk reaction against Kaepernick, and the insidious role of the media to counterpose it to interviews of grieving war widows, shows much has gone backwards since the civil rights activism of the 1960s, when among other things the late Muhammad Ali refused to be drafted into the Vietnam War, saying at that the time, “I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over.” With his passing this summer, Ali was lionized by everyone. But it was his willingness to stand up for justice and peace that was at his core. Did everyone forget his poignant protests, or his conversion, like Abdul-Jabbar, to Islam, in his earlier days? Moreover, my hope is that Kaepernick, Abdul-Jabbar and many others extend their protests to expose the dangers that every NFL player faces from brain damage and the NFL’s insidious campaign to cover it up.
SEPTEMBER 1 - 7, 2016 | PAGE 13
Nicholas F. Benton
Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.
Trump’s Bigotry According to recent polls, the image of Donald Trump as a bigot has begun to crystallize, and for good reason: Because it’s true! A Quinnipiac poll released last week found that 59 percent of likely voters, and 29 percent of likely Republican voters in particular, think that the way Trump talks appeals to bigotry. Republicans were the only anomaly. A majority or plurality of every other demographic measured agreed that Trump’s words appeal to bigotry. But there is one demographic that must be particularly concerning to Trump: college-educated whites. I know that Trump has boasted that he loves the poorly educated, but there appears to be little love lost between him and those white people with degrees. In fact, as the blog FiveThirtyEight predicted in July, “Trump may become the first Republican in 60 years to lose white college graduates.” This may in part be due to his particularly abysmal performance among collegeeducated white women. An ABC News/ Washington Post poll this month found: “Trump enjoys a NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE roughly 40-point lead among white men without college degrees but only a high single-digit lead among college-educated white men. Among white women without college degrees, he leads by low double-digits but trails by nearly 20 points among college-educated white women.” Not only are these college-educated white women likely to recoil from a man they view as biased toward others, they also probably realize their own place as a historically disadvantaged group and know how very harmful bias can be. This is surely earthshattering news for a struggling campaign, so Trump is trying anything and everything to shake the bigotry label on him and make it stick to Hillary Clinton. He has engaged in fake outreach to AfricanAmerican voters, feeding his nearly all-white crowds a healthy diet of the most pernicious stereotypes about the horror and unremitting bleakness of black life. He has waffled and grown more ambiguous on his hard line concerning immigrants. His repeated refrain, supposedly to the black and Hispanic voters, is: “What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance.” But in fact, he’s talking past blacks and Hispanics, two groups he has previously shown little interest in. He is instead speaking directly to the educated white voters who recoil at the thought of supporting a bigot.
Charles M. Blow
Blacks and Hispanics are mere pawns in this appeal. Furthermore, he wants to move the withering light of examination away from himself, his history, his disturbing coziness with white nationalists, and focus that light on the history of racial and ethnic alliances in the opposite political party. There is a disturbing racial undertone to the Trump campaign that goes far beyond the tired narrative of economic anxiety and distress among white people in the flyover states who feel ignored by conventional politicians. That may be one component, but so is this: One of the most effective narratives of Trump’s campaign has been driven by racial isolationism, and racial isolationists appear to be the very ones drawn to that message. This is not partisan theory, but empirical fact. The draft of a major working paper published this month by the Gallup senior economist Jonathan Rothwell found: “His supporters are less educated and more likely to work in blue-collar occupations, but they earn relatively high household incomes, and living in areas more exposed to trade or immigration does not increase Trump support. There is stronger evidence that racial isolation and less strictly economic measures of social status... are robustly predictive of more favorable views toward Trump, and these factors predict support for him but not other Republican presidential candidates.” Specifically on this racial isolation point, Rothwell put it this way: “This analysis provides clear evidence that those who view Trump favorably are disproportionately living in racially and culturally isolated ZIP codes and commuting zones. Excluding other factors, constant support for Trump is highly elevated in areas with few college graduates, far from the Mexican border, and in neighborhoods that stand out within the commuting zone for being white, segregated enclaves, with little exposure to blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.” He continued: “This is consistent with contact theory, which has already received considerable empirical support in the literature in a variety of analogous contexts. Limited interactions with racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and college graduates may contribute to prejudicial stereotypes, political and cultural misunderstandings, and a general fear of rejection and not-belonging.” Racial isolation is the common thread here. It is what would allow his supporters to accept the corrosive mythologies he creates about minorities. But it is this same racial isolation that will make minorities and college-educated white voters avoid Trump like the plague.