Your Racist President Said Haitians 'All Have AIDS' and Nigerians Live in 'Huts'

By Angela Helm, The Root

26 December 17

 

ll the “debate” about whether Donald Trump is really, truly racist should be put to rest now. The man actually opened his mouth in public—as president of the United States—and fixed his flat lips to say that “all Haitians have AIDS and Nigerians live in huts.

The New York Times recently published a report about Trump’s immigration agenda. What many have zeroed in on are the president’s alleged words from a meeting in June, a day after being told how many foreigners had obtained visas to enter the U.S. in 2017.

Reading from a document prepared by Stephen Miller, the oldest 32-year-old I’ve ever seen with his own issues around race, Trump was on one, mad about his immigration ban being struck down and the blackness of the immigrants coming into this country. The Times reports:

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

I mean tell us how you really feel.

Of course, the president doesn’t recall using the words “AIDS” or “huts” but didn’t deny the general gist of the conversation.

Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in an official statement said that “General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims. It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”

Of course none of this is unbelievable, as New York magazine notes Trump has a history of saying and doing racist shit: “Trump has demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five and failed to change his opinion even when they were proven innocent; called Mexicans rapists on the first day of his presidential campaign; defended neo-Nazis; and, of course, advanced a conspiracy theory about the first black president for years.”

And when news broke, folks were all over it:

The fact so many journalists avoid using the term racist to describe this president demonstrates the extent to which the truth comes second to the comfort of (white) readers.

— Samuel Sinyangwe (@samswey) December 23, 2017

I don’t have much to say about Trump’s alleged RACIST, ignorant remarks about Nigerians and Haitians other than to mark it as an example of why internationalist frameworks of racism are crucial, and how anti-blackness infects policymaking.

— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) December 24, 2017

Not only is such language explicitly racist, it’s disgusting, anti-intellectual, anti-black, anti-humanity and just wrong … on all the levels. He’s a menace. To us all.