The chair of Donald Trump’s campaign in a key Ohio county claimed there was “no racism” during the 1960s, and that racism only appeared after President Obama was elected.
“I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this,” said Kathy Miller, Trump’s campaign chair in Mahoning County, when asked if Trump’s campaign has contributed to racism in America.
“Now, with the people with the guns, shooting up neighborhoods, not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetrated on America,” she added. “I think that’s all his responsibility.”
According to a video posted of the interview with The Guardian, Miller said she “never experienced” racism or segregation while growing up in the 1960s. “I never saw that as anything,” Miller said about the civil rights movement.
Mahoning County, in eastern Ohio, is a normally Democratic stronghold and has a 16 percent black population — higher than both the state and national average. No president has ever won the White House without winning Ohio, a state with a 12.7 percent black population.
Miller argued that black Americans have only themselves to blame if they aren’t succeeding.
“If you’re black and you haven’t been successful in the last 50 years, it’s your own fault. You’ve had every opportunity, it was given to you,” she said. “You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have. You had all the advantages and didn’t take advantage of it. It’s not our fault, certainly.”
Miller also called the Black Lives Matter movement “a stupid waste of time” and linked low voter turnout among black Americans as “part of the way they’re raised.”
“For us, I mean, that was something we all did in our families, we all voted,” she said.
Trump has upped his outreach to blacks, and argued, “What the hell do you have to lose?” by voting for him.
At a rally in North Carolina, he told a mostly white audience earlier this week: “We’re going to rebuild our inner cities, because our African-American communities are absolutely in the worse shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever.”
