The Slatest

Local Trump Ohio Campaign Chair: “I Don’t Think There Was Any Racism Until Obama Got Elected”

The Obamas landing in Washington, D.C. Wednesday while chuckling gleefully about their invention of racism.

Zach Gibson/AFP/Getty Images

The Guardian interviewed a woman named Kathy Miller who is the chair of Donald Trump’s campaign in Mahoning County, Ohio, and boy does she have some thoughts. Like:

“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. You’ve had the same schools everybody else went to. You had benefits to go to college that white kids didn’t have.”

Indeed, how could a small boost in university admissions priority not immediately and totally compensate for 350 years of state-sanctioned violent repression and the ongoing, statistically demonstrable discrimination perpetrated by police and judges, landlords and loan officers, employers, and state legislators?

More from Miller (who doesn’t appear, incidentally, to be a paid campaign staffer):

Asked about segregation and the civil rights movement, she replied: “I never experienced it. I never saw that as anything.”

Miller added: “I don’t think there was any racism until Obama got elected. We never had problems like this … Now, with the people with the guns, and shooting up neighborhoods, and not being responsible citizens, that’s a big change, and I think that’s the philosophy that Obama has perpetuated on America.”

Here’s a piece about how in 2008, before he took office and created racism, Obama got disproportionately fewer votes in parts of the country whose residents were particulaly likely to have recently searched Google for jokes involving the word “nigger.” And here’s a piece by a graduate student who found that the U.S. metropolitan area whose residents searched most often for the terms “nigger” and “niggers” was Youngstown, Ohio—the seat of Mahoning County. And here’s the homepage of the realty company in Youngstown, Ohio that Trump county campaign chair Kathy Miller owns. Have fun, Kathy Miller’s black clients!