Donald Trump Reminds Us That White People Still Don’t Get That ‘You Speak So Well’ Isn’t a Compliment
Trump's surprise at the president of Liberia speaking perfect English is peak white ignorance.
There are a lot of people currently scratching their heads, mystified by the fact that more than 77 million Americans elected a man to the highest office in the land who is observably a bumbling idiot, whose abject ignorance of, well, virtually everything couldn't be more apparent.
It's no real mystery, though. President Donald Trump is white — and I mean white white, despite what his orangey-brown spray tan might lead one to believe. And his brand of American whiteness is, if nothing else, familiar.
On Wednesday, Trump was having lunch in the State Dining Room at the White House with the leaders of five African nations. That's a paltry five separate nations that Trump had the opportunity to learn even the barest minimum about before this lunch took place. But since white conservative America is seemingly so proud of not knowing much of anything about anything going on in the world outside of the U.S.A., and Trump represents that segment of America so perfectly well, he ended up asking the president of Liberia — a nation where English is the official language — this stupid-ass question:
“Where did you learn to speak so beautifully?”
“Such good English,” Trump remarked to Liberian President Joseph Boakai. “Where did you learn to speak so beautifully? Where? Were you educated? Where?”
Boakai could barely get a response out before Trump continued: “In Liberia? Well, that’s very interesting. That’s beautiful English. I have people at this table can’t speak nearly as well.” (Some people in the room started laughing at that quip. I have to believe a few of them were snickering because the guy who thinks the word “groceries” is a rarely used “old-fashioned term” with a definition that is limited to “a bag with different things in it” was definitely the person "at this table" he was talking about.)
Here's the thing: If you know America, then you don't necessarily need to take a public poll to offer an educated guess on how certain demographics responded to Trump's latest gaffe. White liberals thought: "OMG, how can this president be so embarrassing?" White conservatives thought: "Wait, wasn't that a compliment? Damn Trump Derangement Syndrome has the left complaining about compliments now?"
“Only the fake news could so pathetically pick apart President Trump’s heartfelt compliment during a meeting that marked a historic moment for U.S.-Africa relations,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly in a statement in response to the public ridicule aimed at Trump for being exhaustingly Caucasian.
Meanwhile, millions of Black people across the nation simply shook their heads in mild annoyance at a thing we didn't even find the least bit shocking.
We've been telling white people that "You speak so well" isn't the compliment they think it is for decades.
Black people and, I imagine, plenty of people of color saw immediately that Trump was tapping into the part of white America that thinks everything non-white and foreign is “exotic.” If you’ve ever witnessed white people rolling their Rs extra hard while ordering food at Mexican restaurants or speaking butchered Spanish to Hispanic workers who’d already demonstrated they speak fluent English, you know what I’m talking about.
Trump was reflecting that part of America that doesn't understand why the Washington football team needed to be renamed, and complained that ditching Aunt Jemima products was "woke" nonsense, despite how often white men called Black women “Aunt Jemima” as an explicit racial slur.
More to the point, Trump represents the part of America that believes Africans are primitive, educated Black people are outliers and that it's odd for Black people — the very people who have perfected the art of code-switching — to "speak so well" by Caucasian standards.
These are the people who think "globalism" is a dirty word, that assimilation into American whiteness should be a requirement for U.S. citizenship and that it's silly to require American students to learn more than one language (like approximately 43% of the world population) because foreigners who come to America should learn English instead.
Now, as the New York Times noted, not everyone in that room spoke fluent English. Several languages were spoken by leaders from a continent that is home to up to a couple of thousand distinct languages. In fact, everyone in the room was wearing headsets so all translations could be heard. But does that mean it's understandable that Trump was so confused?
No.
This might be a feasible excuse if we were talking about a random American citizen who simply wasn't aware that English is Liberia's official language. I'm willing to wager most Americans didn't know that. But most Americans aren't the president of the United States.
Again, there were only five African nations present at that White House lunch. Trump could have done a little bit of research in preparation for the meeting. We're not even talking about real research here. We're talking simple Google searches accessible from the same device Trump uses to type out grammatically incorrect paragraphs of comically broken English on Truth Social every time he feels insulted by someone.
As usual, Trump didn't know what a competent president damn well should have known. Instead, he continues to be the same president who is so ignorant when it comes to the Motherland that he became wholly convinced that white Afrikaners, the only migrants he's shown a willingness to allow in America, are “fleeing” a fictional “white genocide” in South Africa. (We haven't heard much about that since Trump and Elon Musk broke up, though. I wonder if there's a correlation there.)
“Asking the President of Liberia where he learned English when it’s literally the official language is peak ignorance,” Rep. Jasmine Crockett, Democrat from Texas, said in a post on social media. “I’m pretty sure being blatantly offensive is not how you go about conducting diplomacy.”
Exactly.
Ultimately, Trump's latest gaffe probably isn't such a big deal that it might threaten relations between the U.S. and Liberia. It's only really significant because white American ignorance is so annoying, and the president has, once again, put it on display for the world to see.
Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society — a group that believed slavery was wrong, but also that Black folk shouldn’t be afforded space in the U.S. — to provide a “native homeland” for American Blacks. English has been their official language for over 175 years now. Of course, knowing that would involve knowing history that included Black people, so I guess that’s too DEI for Trump and company.
Yeah, and that's ultimate white privilege in a nutshell. You can be the biggest dumbass in the country and possibly the world, but a bunch of other white people are going to act like you poop vanilla ice cream.
And I say this as a crabby old white lady.