Welcome to Bleak History Month, where diversity is being dismantled and Tiger Woods is our new hero.
Question for President Trump: How is it that you consider Woods to be Black, and not Kamala Harris?
Did we miss something? If memory serves, Woods has never fully embraced being identified as Black.
In fact, Woods once said he was so uncomfortable with it that he came up with a whole new word to describe himself: “Cablinasian.”
Yet, there was Trump at the White House the other day parading the golfing great around at an event honoring Black History Month, of all things.
Trump said he would consider erecting a statue of Woods in a new “National Garden of American Heroes” alongside such Black luminaries as Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.
Athletes like Muhammad Ali and Kobe Bryant would also be in the garden, Trump said.
“Let me ask you,” Trump said. “Is there anybody like our Tiger?”
He may be your Tiger, but he’s not ours anymore.
The rest of you can have him, because Black people need someone who is going to take a stand when the rest of us are under attack.
While guests at Trump’s Black History event whipped out their cell phones to take pictures of the president rubbing salt in our wounds, Woods just stood there with a grin as wide as the gulf between Black and white America, and said nothing.
Nothing of substance, anyway,
“Hey, it’s an honor to be here,” Woods said. “It’s an honor to be here with you, Mr. President, and to be here with all of you.”
Then, Trump went on to insult every man woman and child in the United States by making light of the impact of slavery on our nation’s history.
“The last administration tried to reduce all of American history to a single year, 1619,” Trump said. “But under our administration, we honor the indispensable role Black Americans have always played in the immortal cause of another date, 1776.”
Woods’ White House bogey came months after Trump — at a National Association of Black Journalists conference, of all places — questioned Harris’ Black credentials.
“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black,” Trump said at the Chicago convention. “Now she wants to be known as Black. She was Indian all the way, And then she made a turn, and she became a Black person.”
Harris, the former vice president, who lost to Trump in November, said she never shied away from being identified as Black.
“My mother understood very well that she was raising two Black daughters,” Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, wrote in “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” her 2019 memoir. “She knew her adopted homeland would see Maya and me as Black girls, and she was determined to make sure we would grow into confident, proud Black women.”
Harris was not invited to the White House reception. Neither was anyone from the Congressional Black Caucus.
But Woods was there, along with Republican Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina; former ESPN host Sage Steele and football great Herschel Walker.
It’s not a crime against the Black race to take a picture with Donald Trump.
I didn’t have a problem with a Black college marching band playing at his inauguration.
But you don’t get to just stand there and smile like you just won the Masters as the president of the United States disparages our history, dismantles diversity programs and pretends that Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King Jr. would have approved.
You don’t get a mulligan for that.
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