black people, stop letting trump use you as tokens

If you haven’t heard, several presidents of our country’s Historically Black Colleges & Universities visited the White House this week and the internet has been ablaze with hot takes condemning them stepping foot into the Oval Office. With Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s counselor and a common face in the media, kneeling like a child on the couch in a flippant show of disrespect and lack of decorum, Black Twitter served up a healthy dose of criticism. Supporters and defenders of the presidents said that the meeting was evil, but a necessary evil, because of the federal support that HBCUs depend on for their operation, while others made no room for the financial dependency and instead called them “coons” and “tokens.” Trump’s racist rhetoric isn’t up for debate. Referring to his constituency of African-Americans as “The Blacks” or referring to Chicago as some abyss of chaos and Black violence is racism. So to say that this visit isn’t tainted, that it’s purely business as usual is to leave all that knowledge at the threshold of the White House doors. So to the HBCU presidents, the Ben Carsons, and the small share of vocal and physically present Black folks going to visit the president, know that you’re being used; used for photo ops to make him look like less of what we know him and his administration to be–the racist, xenophobic, hateful group trying to capitalize on other people’s pain in the name of god and capital gains.

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