Harvard prof: Obama drove 'white people totally out of their minds'
“To go from [the Obamas] to Trump is a seismic revolution that is the result of a collapse of expectation," the professor argued.
In an earlier interview, a Harvard professor insisted that Trump's election was the result of white Americans being upset at the sucess of black Americans.
Harvard professor and Emmy-winning filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr says former President Barack Obama “drove white people totally out of their minds,” and that fueled white voters’ support for President Donald Trump.
Gates currently serves as the Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University in addition to producing civil rights themed films. He has been awarded 55 honorary degrees and became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal.
In 2009, Gates was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct after a neighbor mistakenly thought he was breaking into a house. After Gates entered what was actually his home, a policeman arrived in response to the report. The officer asked Gates to “step outside,” but he refused and grew belligerent calling the officer “racist.”
President Barack Obama, a friend of Gates, responded to the incident by stating that the Cambridge Police Department acted “stupidly.”
Charges against Gates were later dropped.
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In an interview earlier this year with the New York Times Magazine, Gates credited what the Times Magazine characterized as white people’s “resentment” toward African Americans’ successes for Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
“Is it too simplistic to say that the energy driving the current moment is also a reaction to black progress and Obama’s becoming president,” asked the New York Times magazine.
Gates responded by saying he does not know. However, he quickly added that the notion of Michelle and Barack Obama driving “white people totally out of their minds” is “partly true” and that “between Martin Luther King’s death and now, the black middle class has doubled and the black upper-middle class has quadrupled” while white workers’ wages have stagnated.
He says that this “curve of rising expectations” being “interrupted” is what caused white people to “go nuts” and subsequently vote President Donald Trump into office.
”So you might look at a black family in the White House, all these black people who joined the upper-middle class, and there’s a kind of collective “What the [expletive]?” said Gates.
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“To go from [the Obamas] to Trump is a seismic revolution that is the result of a collapse of expectation,” remarked the professor.
“This professor is obviously mistaken as Trump had more support in the black community than Mitt Romney, John McCain or even George Bush…”Joel Patrick, an African American conservative social media influencer, told Campus Reform.
Gates has donated thousands of dollars to the presidential and senatorial campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
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