By Legrand H. Clegg II
Nationwide — On August third, 2025, President Donald Trump referred to Charlemagne Tha God, a preferred Black discuss present host, as a “low IQ particular person” due to the feedback the host had made about Trump on Fox Information. Journalist Brittany Wong famous that, “When it’s a public determine who’s an individual of coloration he’s attacking, [Trump] tends to denigrate them on the premise of their intelligence stage.” There are quite a few examples of this.
On August 4, 2018, Trump wrote that “Lebron James was simply interviewed by the dumbest man on tv, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look good, which isn’t simple to do.” Trump has additionally referred to Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Jasmine Crockett as “low I.Q.” Nonetheless, he seems to have reserved his most scathing assaults for former Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent within the 2024 Presidential marketing campaign. He referred to her as “dumb”, “mentally unfit”, “gradual”, “silly,” and “a particularly low I.Q. individual.”
Carrie Gillow, a linguist and co-host of the podcast, Vocal Fries, has said that [i]t’s completely evident that [Trump] thinks Black individuals have decrease I.Q.’s than white individuals—and believes IQ is a crucial and actual option to measure intelligence, and that there’s just one sort of intelligence”.
The concept that Black persons are genetically inferior to whites, particularly as to intelligence, has persevered in the US for the reason that days of slavery. We have been as soon as labelled “3/fifth’s” of a person, the cursed descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, and sub-humans with no historical past previous to slavery and colonialism.
By and huge, we as African Individuals have lengthy chosen to disregard White claims about our inferiority and striven as a bunch to show ourselves equal to all different individuals on this planet. Whereas such a response is noble and laudable, it has not resulted in a cessation of White supremacist propaganda emanating from both the White lots or the White Home. At this juncture in historical past, then, we should deal with these insults head-on at any time when and wherever they seem, lest we lose one other technology of Black youths to the forces of racism which have instilled in too lots of them a way of hopelessness and inferiority.
Earlier than the entire books are banned and the museums shut down by Donald Trump, allow us to look on the historic document. Astrophysicist Thomas Brophy and Egyptologist Robert Bauval have written that “scientists within the subject of genetics have been mentioning that it could really be appropriate to say that the world was created by black individuals.”
The phrases of White writer Flora Lugard make clear the grandeur of Blacks in antiquity: “The annals of the entire nice early nations of Asia Minor are filled with them. The Mosaic data allude to them often; however whereas they’re described as probably the most highly effective, probably the most simply, and probably the most stunning of the human race, they’re always spoken of as black, and there appears to be no different conclusion to be drawn then that at that distant interval of historical past, the main race of the Western World was a black race.”
One other White scholar, Richard Poe, reveals that amongst historic individuals there was the “presumption that darkish pores and skin connoted increased intelligence.” In different phrases, within the historic world, the blacker you have been, the extra clever you have been assumed to be. Why did the ancients view Black individuals with such respect and reverence?
The reply is evident. DNA proof traces all human beings again to 1 Black lady in Africa. Her offspring migrated from internal Africa down the Nile Valley and based the traditional Egyptian civilization. From Africa, these Black individuals unfold around the globe and laid the muse of civilization in Greece, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley of India, Southern China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and the New World.
Despite widespread racism and discrimination, Black individuals have additionally made huge contributions to the trendy world normally and America specifically. Not solely was California named after the legendary Black queen Calafia, but additionally Chicago was based by the Black pioneer, Jean Baptiste Level du Sable. Sensible Black scientists and inventors, corresponding to Dr. Henry T. Sampson (The Gamma Electrical Cell), Granville T. Woods (The Induction Telegraph), Dr. Valerie L. Thomas (The Illusions Transmitter), Lonnie Johnson (The Thermoelectric Power Conversion System), and Dr. Patricia Tub (the Laserphaco Probe) have additionally made immeasurable contributions to this nation.
For President Trump, whose cupboard has been labelled probably the most mediocre in American historical past, to always demean Black individuals as “low IQ” is ironic, racist, and absurd. Based on White scientists, Black persons are the genetically dominant mother and father of the human household who laid down the muse of world civilization. Let this sink in earlier than all of the historical past books are banned or burned!
Legrand H. Clegg II is the Metropolis Lawyer Emeritus of Compton, California, and a printed historian.
