I’m Sorry, Why Is Anyone Asking Jared Kushner to Discuss Issues of Race?

Jared Kushner appeared on Fox News Monday to talk about Donald Trump’s impact on Black Americans and guess what, it didn’t go well! Actually, I bet Kushner thought it went great, as probably did the rest of Team Mayonnaise that decided it was an A+ idea to take on issues of race in the first place:

image: screengrab

But I assure you, it was not great.

Here’s what Kushner had to say about the Black experience:

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 of the problems that they’re complaining about. But he can’t want them to be successful more than they want to be successful.

What you’re seeing throughout the country now is a groundswell of support in the Black community because they’re realizing that all the different bad things that the media and the Democrats have said about President Trump are not true and so they’re seeing that he’s actually delivered, he’s put up results.

Kushner also added that his dad-in-law “may not always say the right things but he does the right things,” which has been a talking point this campaign team has been pushing hard lately: the idea that it’s Trump’s tone or delivery that’s the problem, that his “honesty” is “too hardcore” as Tiffany Trump recently said. That, of course, is just false. He does not always say the right thing but he does the right thing even less often.

As for Jared’s thoughts on “the Black community,” someone should probably tell him that Black people are not a monolith. Someone should also ask him to expand on what exactly he thinks Black people are “complaining” about. If he’s referring to systemic discrimination, police brutality, voter suppression, the school-to-prison pipeline, and any other issues directly related to institutional, generational racism, then maybe “complain” isn’t the best word to use.

Kushner’s statements also carry the age-old white supremacist ideology that Black people only struggle in America because they won’t accept the benevolence of white leaders like Donald Trump.

This is especially rich coming from Jared Kushner, referring to Donald Trump, both of whom famously come from families whose businesses thrived off of exploiting and/or excluding Black people.

Also, both men were born into families with an abundance of wealth and connections. Neither one of them has ever had to actually build anything of their own, so the idea that they know what it takes to succeed in America, aside from being born wealthy, is pure farce.

By the way, the clip above is the one making the rounds online but in the same interview, Kushner claimed that a lot of the people—including NBA players who he weirdly, specifically singled out—expressing pain and grief and outrage following the murder of George Floyd were just “virtue signaling” and “did more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.”

It must be close to Halloween if they’re letting ghouls like this on television.

(via Bloomberg, image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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