Pastor Says Trump Is Creating ‘Real Opportunities’ for African-Americans

Pastor Mark Burns praised President Donald Trump for creating “real opportunities” and giving “real financial boosts” to African-Americans after only one year in the Oval Office, during an interview Monday on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle.”

Burns, an African-American televangelist and 2016 Trump campaign supporter, debated Democratic strategist Wendy Osefo, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University and founder and CEO of The 1954 Equity Project LCC, on the Ingraham program.

Although Osefo claimed that Trump “hasn’t done anything tangible” to help black Americans, Burns argued that Trump has honored Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy by creating an economic environment that welcomes black Americans and makes it possible for them to improve their standard of living.

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“President Trump has made it very clear that the only true way to eliminate those violent places like Chicago and Baltimore is to give real opportunities, to give real financial boosts into these communities,” Burns said, pointing to the two cities’ unprecedented black-on-black crime rates. “It’s not the police — it’s the lack of opportunities.”

Burns also criticized the Democratic Party, saying it has “used and abused the black voice in America” for decades. He highlighted how Democrats often default to pointing to the president’s latest crude or careless remarks and then accusing Trump of being a “racist” to provide a “distraction” from the real issues at hand.

“And the fact is, the Democratic Party will hone in on anything that will paint the president as racist because it’s a distraction of the real issue,” Burns said. “Words do matter, but deeds matter more. And the fact is, Democrats have been doing a lot of talking but little deeds.”

Osefo argued that Trump “has done tangible things to hurt” black communities in America without doing “anything tangible that we can point to, to say that he has helped African-Americans.”

Although Osefo claimed that African-Americans “are not victims,” she repeatedly contended that “policies within our society” and the U.S. criminal justice system in particular have been “harsher on black and brown individuals” than on white Americans.

“African-Americans, black Americans — we are not victims. We cannot say that,” Osefo said. “The Democrats are not trying to victimize us by any way, and for us to paint that narrative is part of the problem.”

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“We are striving. We are making ourselves better. And we can pull ourselves up from the bootstraps,” Osefo continued. “But for us to think and not look at the systematic hurdles that our society has would be for us to be blind to what’s going on in our country.”

When host Laura Ingraham asked Osefo point-blank whether Trump was at fault for the extreme levels of violence in cities like Chicago, Osefo said “there are policies within our society that make it so that those issues continue to be perpetuated in Chicago.”

“We’re not victims, but our society — our society makes it such that if you commit a crime and you are black or brown, you have a higher rate of being in prison than your white counterparts. That is a fact,” Osefo said.

“When we look at our criminal justice system,” Osefo further claimed, “we see that when it comes to black and brown individuals, our criminal justice system is harsher on black and brown individuals.”

PoliZette writer Kathryn Blackhurst can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter.