Sunday on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said President Donald Trump “needs to be a lot more careful in the way that he speaks about,” race.
Zakaria said, “When you hear President Trump say of congressional representatives that are Somali American, you know, they should go back to the country that they came from when he says in Charlottesville, there were good people on both sides, this seems to me such a contrast from President Bush. Bush the second, the man for whom you served, in terms of having —he had the first black secretary of state, he had the first female black national security adviser. The way he talked about Islam after 9/11 was so thoughtful, in trying to not demean Islam as a religion. When you hear Trump, this must —this is the repudiation of everything you and Bush were trying to do.”
Rice said, “Look, the president needs to be a lot more careful in the way that he speaks about these things because race is a very delicate and raw nerve in America. We have a birth defect of slavery. We have a birth defect of a number of people being treated badly, so you have to be careful.”
She continued, “But I’ll tell you, Fareed, it’s not all coming out of the White House. I hear a lot coming out of the left on these issues, too, that I don’t like the language that is used about people, the notion that because somebody looks a certain way or is of a certain color, they ought to think a certain way, and if they don’t think a certain way, then they’re really not black. You know, come on, we need to all backoff. We need to watch our language toward one another. We need to start to apply that golden rule. Don’t say something about somebody that you wouldn’t want to be said about you. And I think we’ll all be better off. I think this is a national project, not a White House project, not a congressional project. It’s a national project.”
She added, “I’ve said, and I think everybody understands that I don’t like a lot of the language that this president uses. I especially don’t like the language about immigrants because, in so many ways, immigrants are an easy target.”
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