White House senior adviser and Donald Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner is no stranger to making appearances on TV. We’ve seen him go on a number of networks to describe the federal government’s COVID-19 response as a “great success story,” proudly announce he’ll send his kids to in-person school amid the pandemic, and theorize that by June, “a lot of the country should be back to normal.” Now, more than 200,000 Americans are dead due to the literal global pandemic the Trump administration has failed to control.
Most recently, Kushner appeared on Fox & Friends on Monday morning where he said Black people need to “want to be successful” for Trump’s policies to actually benefit them. Whew. Let’s check out the viral clip and full comments below.
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First, here is that clip.
Kushner, of course, also made time to suggest that people who have come out to support Black Lives Matter are merely “virtue signaling. “
“You saw a lot of people who were just virtue signaling, they’d go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court,” Kushner stated. “And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”
Daily Kos has covered the growing number of athletes who have publicly stood with Black Lives Matter, including tennis icon Naomi Osaka, a number of leagues, and of course, former NFL star Colin Kaepernick. Trump himself has taken to Twitter to attack athletes who peacefully protested, including those who kneeled during the national anthem.
“One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’s policies are the policies that can help people break out the problems that they’re complaining about,” Kushner continued. “But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, his choice to categorize systemic oppression and racial injustice as “problems” people are “complaining about” is obviously an intentional one. And the idea that Black people’s systemic barriers to employment, housing, and economic equity rest simply on a desire to “want to be successful” is such a tired, offensive bootstraps logic it’s a wonder anyone thinks that rhetoric would make waves with anyone in this day and age.
Until you remember Kushner made this assertion on Fox News.
Now, we know that more than 70% of Fox News viewers are white, according to January 2019 data from an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. So, what is Kushner really doing? He’s stoking hateful, racist stereotypes about Black people to a mostly white audience. That’s not trying to reach Black voters—that’s trying to appeal to a fanbase that wants their latent (or not so latent) racist views affirmed. Talk about wanting to polarize people instead of bringing them forward, huh?
Here’s a longer clip of the conversation on YouTube.
