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Tone-Deaf Trump Breaks Out the ‘Slavemaster Speak’ at Golf Course When He Spots a Little Black Girl With an Afro

What is it with him and hair?

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Alright, let’s start this one with a question for all my Black women readers: What’s the number one most annoying thing a white person can say to you immediately on sight? Is it about your hair? I bet it’s about your hair.

Unfortunately, white people don’t have much idea what it is to have Black hair. We never marveled at our first relaxer. Literally none of us has ever touched our head with a toothbrush or a boar bristle brush. White people put jam on a sandwich, not in their hair.

If you haven’t noticed an ongoing theme in my articles about Donald Trump and his hair, it’s that I write about his so much because my girl is a hairdresser. I take a lot of pride in my own hair, and have her to thank. I watch countless old women, trendy rainbow-haired hipster girls, men retired from dentistry or the theater, and moms whose kids just won’t sit for anyone but my girl walk in and out of her salon every day, and all but one of them has a singular characteristic in common: They’re all white.

And the one Black woman? She’s our neighbor two doors down and her hair is mostly relaxed, somewhere else. She comes for a trim because her front door is 60 feet from ours.

Black women know the condescension, intended or not, in white people admiring their hair. There is no understanding. We literally have a styling product called “Bed Head” that is used to make your hair look messy, like you just woke up.

And I get that Donald Trump is probably just jealous of ANYONE with hair, since his mother would’ve breastfed him through a straw if he looked like that as a baby.

But the scene he made over a little Black girl at his golf course was just cringeworthy. Even you white people reading have some idea now that Black women have a lifetime ahead of them of white people saying “Oh, I love your hair!” no matter if it looks especially white-style-presenting or is in locs or is in a big, natural afro.

Now imagine that the first white person a little girl has fawn over her hair like she’s some kind of circus animal is Donald Trump.

Take away the cutesy voice he’s using. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that he sounds pretty patronizing with the voice, but get rid of it in your head for a minute and hear him saying it in an even tone.

NOW does it sound like a rich white man who has no idea he’s even talking to a human?

Here’s what’s really messed up about this, though. Now her first experience with some jackass about her hair was with a guy that she’ll later find out refused to rent to her granddad in New York in the 70s. Maybe her great uncle was one of the Black men that the pit bosses had to ask to leave the floor of the casino when Trump and his first wife would visit.

Maybe one day when she’s in college she’s doing a report on Black victims of the justice system, and she reads about the Central Park Five, and how Trump took out a full-page ad in every newspaper in NYC calling for those boys to be executed for a non-capital offense that they were later found innocent of through DNA. Maybe she stumbles across his tweet from more than a DECADE after they were exonerated, where he says “If they were innocent, what were they doing in the park that night? Playing checkers?”

As one commenter put it,

And really, this is the problem. Even if that girl’s parent is a Trump supporter, they know this deep in their heart after hearing him do the same thing that clueless white people have done to their mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, and aunts:

The saddest part is, this is where I warn you not to actually click the tweets that I’ve embedded here, because the replies on this video defending him will make sense to you after reading this article: You’ll understand that, like Trump, these defensive white folks will say “What?!? He was complimenting her!” like a construction worker getting torn up for catcalling a woman walking past the site.

The lesson here is, don’t be this guy.

Andrew Simpson
meet the author

Andrew is a dark blue speck in deep red Central Washington, writing with the conviction of 18 years at the keyboard and too much politics to even stand. When not furiously stabbing the keys on breaking news stories, he writes poetry, prose, essays, haiku, lectures, stories for grief therapy, wedding ceremonies, detailed instructions on making doughnuts from canned biscuit dough (more sugar than cinnamon — duh), and equations to determine the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. A girlfriend, a dog, two cats, and two birds round out the equation, and in his spare time, Drewbear likes to imagine what it must be like to have spare time.

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