How Trump Lied To Black Voters

Earlier this week, The New York Times uncovered a memo that features
Trump’s new very important agenda item: tackling affirmative action
and taking legal action against schools that apply it. Now I’ll be talking about
all the problems with affirmative action today. But before we get to that,
let’s go back to Trump’s plea to black people for a second:
“What do you have to lose, by trying something new, like Trump?”
Turns out, if you vote for a dude who dog whistled to white supremacists
throughout his campaign- you’re slated to lose at least some things.
Things like affirmative action are now on the chopping block.
Except it’s crucial to recognize that this is only going to affect the poor
and the marginalized- for the wealthy, it doesn’t really matter
if you’re under-qualified, you just toss the school a couple of million dollars
and your transcripts become just a formality for admission to
top colleges and universities. And let’s take a look at Kushman-
Jared Kushner- who got into Harvard after his father selflessly gave
the school $2.5 million dollars. Now this pay-to-play arrangement
at elite institutions is not exactly a secret amongst the wealthy.
College endowments depend more than ever on private donations,
since admitting low income geniuses just doesn't really pay enough for
the Scrooge McDuckian deans to live on. But even when wealthy
white people don’t legally bribe their way into college, they still
have an unfair advantage. Their fallback option is relying
on “legacy” admissions, which give preferential status to applicants
with a family connection to the school. But you might say I’m colorblind
and a legacy can be of any color, right? Sure, except that it doesn’t and it wasn't
until the Brown vs Board of Education in 1954 that schools were mandated
to desegregate. And to top that off, that decision was ignored until
a decade later when the Civil Rights Act, that schools were actually forced
to integrate. Basically, “legacy admissions” is code word for “Hey white people,
"you can go to white college because your white family went to white college.”
Now if it wasn't already obvious, legacy admissions is a system which
perpetuates itself based on prior racial discrimination. And by prior,
I mean just recently in history, as in: Trump and Jeff Sessions
were both still in school during segregation. Obviously Sessions, never really left that era.
And now, Sessions with the help of Trump, is bringing back the good
ole’ days which includes some of worst policies for black people
in recent history.
“What do you have to lose?”
“Bye-bye.”
Jeff Beauregard Sessions III is one of the worst things to happen to
black people since “Birth of a Nation.” While “Birth of a Nation” made
the Klan seem cool and exacerbated racial tensions, at least the film is more
than a hundred years old and no one ever really watches it except for as
an example of how racist as fuck things were back then, whereas Sessions,
the nation’s most powerful attorney, was deemed too racist to be a judge
in the eighties. In. The. Eighties. The eighties were racist as fuck.
How racist do you have to be to be called a racist in the 80s?
“I am not a racist!”
Jeffrey, the fact that you had to say this during a nomination hearing is already
problematic, but turns out all we had to do to see how racist you are was just wait.
Since your appointment to Attorney General and part-time White House lawn gnome,
you’ve tried everything in your goddamn power, which is a lot of power, to dismantle
the progress we have made thus far in civil rights. Your first act as
Attorney General was to reinstate taxpayer funded corporate-owned prisons in
the US, even though many studies show their lack of efficiency
and poor safety standards. Oh and also, it’s inherently unethical and immoral
to make money off of incarcerating people. But that controversial reversal
was probably to prep for the inevitable increase in the number of incarcerated
since you then restarted the failed war on drugs.
That’s-That’s pretty cool too.
You’re also advocating for letting lawbreaking police off the hook,
while Trump simultaneously promotes police violence.
“Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and you’re protecting their head,
"you know? The way you put their hand. Like, don’t hit their head, and they’ve just
"killed somebody. Don’t hit their head. I said you can take the hand away, okay?”
This is fucking insane. Guilty until proven innocent, right? And you’ve
even made it harder for defendants to prove their innocence because
you’ve cut back on forensic science, which has proven invaluable in
reversing wrongful convictions. But we’re the one’s who are
being divisive, of course. These are the reasons why we need
a leveled playing field. Look, let's remember what affirmative action is.
It’s a policy favoring those who tend to suffer from discrimination.
So it isn’t a bias that favors blacks, Mexicans, women or even members
of the LGBT population. It just happens that those are the communities that have
historically been discriminated against in all aspects of life, including education.
If white people were the marginalized group, they would be the beneficiaries
of affirmative action. The system isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean
it hasn’t helped. To equate affirmative action with clear cut racial discrimination
is not only categorically false- it's also an effort to deny the repressive,
and often violent history of oppression African-Americans have historically faced-
and continue to face today.
I’m Hasan Piker, please share this video with your friends, if you think marginalized
communities deserve a level playing field. Please don’t forget to follow me
on Instagram @hasandpiker and on Twitter @hasanthehun.
And this has been the breakdown.

How Trump Lied To Black Voters

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