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Title: Fox News explains to ‘uneducated’ black Americans how Trump is already helping inner cities
Source: Washington (Com)Post
URL Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news ... cities/?utm_term=.de0e51f29a4f
Published: Jan 20, 2017
Author: Philip Bump
Post Date: 2017-01-21 11:19:13 by Dakmar
Keywords: None
Views: 63

Closing out an interview with Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, Fox News's Steve Doocy turned to the camera to entice viewers to stick around through the commercial on Friday morning.

“Straight ahead,” Doocy said, “critics won't admit it, but President-elect Trump is already making America's inner cities livable again.”

That assertion, ascribing improvements to the “inner cities” to the man who was at that point not yet the president, was a bold one. It seems hard to measure: What counts as the “inner city”? What form did those improvements take? How did Trump earn the credit?

To answer those questions, the hosts of “Fox and Friends” welcomed Brunell Donald-Kyei, Trump's “diversity liaison.” Trump tends to use the term “inner cities” interchangeably with “places black people live,” and Donald-Kyei was on-set to help explain how the president-elect was already making the lives of black Americans better. (Black Americans, you may recall, overwhelmingly preferred Hillary Clinton in November, though Trump at one point thanked them for not coming out to vote in large numbers.)

Well, not exactly to answer those questions.

After Doocy introduced Donald-Kyei, co-host Brian Kilmeade offered the first question.

“So many people in the African American community seem to be uneducated about what Donald Trump intends to do,” Kilmeade said. Donald-Kyei, who is black, offered that lesson.

Yes. Well, we know that during the campaign he said, “Look, I'm going to put $100 billion into the inner cities over the next eight years. Not only that, school choice is going to be on the table — not just for African Americans but for all of our American children. He said he is going to put, you know, investment into communities where they have been starved. They have waited on life support for the Democratic Party, many of them 50 years, 40 years, 80 years and still no recovery, no help, no relief. And so we know that he has made that pledge and that I expect that he will follow through on that.

Two pledges there: $100 billion into the inner city and school vouchers. The $100 billion comes from a November speech in Charlotte, where Trump promised to end spending on climate change, yielding that much over eight years. That money would be spent “to help rebuild the vital infrastructure, including water systems, in America’s inner cities.”

Donald-Kyei also conflates “black Americans” with “inner cities.” In October, The Atlantic cited numbers from a researched at Brookings Institution about the extent to which that was the case. Census Bureau data indicate that 36 percent of black Americans live in cities — though not necessarily the “inner city.” Thirty-nine percent, the plurality, live in suburban areas. The remainder are in smaller metropolitan or rural areas. Those numbers have shifted in recent years; black Americans used to live more heavily in urban areas. In 1990, 57 percent of black Americans lived in large cities. This is the tail end of the Reagan era, the period that seems to define much of Trump's political thinking.

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Poster Comment:

I can't help but laugh as the left wing continues its meltdown. Aside from the fact that the headline is grossly misleading as to the actual comment, no mention is given to the inescapable reality that blacks are by and large less educated than whites. I found a table that breaks down high school graduation rates (2011-2012) by race here. "Nationwide, black students graduated at a rate of 69 percent; Hispanics graduated at 73 percent; whites graduated at a rate of 86 percent."

Yet all we hear about is the spending gap, which is another fallacy. Most of these big cities where blacks are concentrated spend much more per student than majorty white districts, with DC and Detroit coming at the very top except for a few weird districts in Califronia. To verify my suspicions, I found 2016’s Cities with the Most & Least Efficient Spending on Education. Sort the table by Expenditures Per capita, and what shows up at the top? Washington DC, followed by several cities in New York. Couldn't help but notice Baltimore, Chicago, Gary, Memphis etc all near the top of the list. Except for locations in New York, and maybe Chicago, none of these areas are particularly expensive, so cost of living arguments can be readily discounted.

So calling white working class Americans who voted for Trump uneducated is perfectly acceptable, God forbid anyone call blacks uneducated unless they are trying to wheedle more lucre from the "uneducated" tax payers.

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