By Canberk Yuksel and Hakan Copur
NEW YORK
Towering above legends at the top of the NBA’s all-time scoring list, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recognizes success when he sees it.
And he doesn’t see it in Donald Trump.
Abdul-Jabbar is not one to mince words. A world-renowned figure for his stupendous basketball career, as well as his heartfelt activism and incisive writing, the 69-year-old Hall of Famer wonders how the embattled Republican presidential nominee is still running for the highest office in the United States.
“Donald Trump has vigorously proven himself to be a racist, misogynist, homophobe, xenophobe, as well as uninformed, inarticulate, and having a weak temperament,” Abdul-Jabbar said in an exclusive interview with Anadolu Agency.
“Any one of these characteristics should disqualify him from being president; all of them together should disqualify him from the company of good people.”
With only a fortnight before the Nov. 8 polls when American voters will decide who will take the helm of the world’s superpower for the next four years, many citizens look forward more to the end of a bitter election cycle than exercising their hard-earned right to vote. Abdul-Jabbar is one of them.
“This has been the oddest and scariest campaign of my lifetime,” he said.
In a turn of fate, he thinks the frothing negativity might still offer a silver lining for Generation Z, the demographic cohort immediately after millennials -- in other words, twentysomethings.
“Generation Z has just had a serious wake-up call by going through the most divisive presidential election in recent history”, he said. “That’s a good thing, because now they have a more realistic vision of America and the spectrum of differences.”
‘Punchline for jokes’
Meanwhile, Trump is more likely to represent the shoemaker’s always-barefoot son in this theater, according to Abdul-Jabbar.
This election cycle “will go down in history as the time the most unqualified person in history ran for president, was soundly defeated, and then was forgotten except as the punchline of jokes,” he said.
Polls, though by no means uniform, show Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton pulling ahead, and young voters have a part to play. According to a major study recently published by the Black Youth Project group, the seasoned Democrat is on her way to matching Barack Obama's support with the younger voters in 2012 with a decisive 60 percent.
As for the campaign, Trump and Clinton have had their fair share of scandalous revelations, but in the case of the Republican candidate, they have proven ground-shaking.
After bringing the race to a dead heat in September, Trump had the rug pulled out from underneath when a video was made public in which he made obscene remarks about groping and preying on women.
It has since evolved into a full-blown saga on sexual assault, with a multitude of women coming forward with allegations against the business mogul, who denied all of them and threatened legal action.
That is where part of Clinton’s appeal lies for Abdul-Jabbar, who became the former secretary of state’s cultural ambassador in 2012 and supported her by taking the stage at the Democratic National Convention.
“What Obama did for racism, I expect Hillary Clinton will do for misogyny, which is just as rampant and harmful in the U.S. as racism,” Abdul-Jabbar said.
Regardless of the magnitude of the recent controversy, for Trump there was an earlier watershed moment, which was followed by a series of blunders that took the campaign so far off message Trump had to address rampant speculation that he might drop out of the race. And that was before the indecency charges.
Khan family
The original sin was the Republican’s attacks on the Khan family -- perceived by many as Islamophobic and xenophobic. Abdul-Jabbar introduced the couple at the convention as the Muslim Gold Star parents of an American hero, Humayun Khan, who died to save his fellow servicemen while on duty in Iraq in 2004.
Before introducing the Khans, the legendary basketball player told the thousands of Democrats gathered in Philadelphia that he was Michael Jordan “because I know Donald Trump could not tell the difference”.
What followed became one of the highlights of the campaign. Khizr Khan’s poignant remarks, in which he asked Trump “Have you even read the United States constitution?” to thunderous applause from the convention.
Khan was referring in part to the fateful words that launched Trump’s hardline immigration policy: “A total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Trump’s retort, belittling Khan and portraying his wife as oppressed, drew Abdul-Jabbar’s ire. “The Khan family reinvigorated me for the fight ahead to defeat Donald Trump,” he wrote in Time magazine.
“He’s like loudmouth in the saloon in American Western movies, trying to whip up a lynch mob,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “The one good thing Trump has done is identified the extent of Islamophobia and why it’s occurring. This will help us address it in the future.”
Another ongoing debate in American society is over race relations -- a perennial question that has been exacerbated over the last few months. An immeasurably successful black leader, Abdul-Jabbar has, since his youth, been a civil rights advocate.
In August, he authored Writings on the Wall: Searching for a New Equality Beyond Black and White, which discusses race relations and more with honesty and authenticity.
“I encountered many racial slurs over my career,” he said. “And I encountered much hostility when I converted to Islam. Many people saw it as a rejection of American values, while I saw it as embracing American values.”
The racial equality protests that have marked a summer of discontent for Americans appear to have taken a back seat in the heat of the imminent election but the issues have not gone anywhere.
Racism
The high-profile police shootings of black people and other incidents -- there were reports this week of a black high-school student in Mississippi having a noose put around his neck by a group of white students -- in recent months has prompted civil rights activists to cry foul and urge a federal hate crime investigation.
“Each new generation reads about the horrors of the past and thinks we’ve come so far that there is no longer a problem,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “That's because they can’t see that racism is like any organism, it evolves to protect its existence.
“They see that slavery is gone, the Jim Crow laws are gone, open segregation is gone, therefore racism is gone. But racism has just borrowed deeper into the infrastructure of society, like termites in the frame of a house. It’s in the walls: voter IDs, police violence, discrimination in housing, jobs and education.”
Drawing on his years as an activist, Abdul-Jabbar has a simple, clear plan about how to fix the problem. “First, we have to illuminate racism wherever it hides so that white Americans can see it, acknowledge it, and join us in eliminating it,” he said.
“Second, people of color have to work together politically to force changes in laws and business practices that are most harmful to us.”
Abdul-Jabbar is proud of the nation’s first black president and believes his legacy will be much more than being the first black elected to the Oval Office.
“President Obama presided with compassion, dignity, and strength, and told a whole new generation of people of color that no office is out of their reach. That level of inspiration alone has changed the country forever,” he said.
From Obama to Muhammad Ali, Abdul-Jabbar can see a long legacy of inspiration.
“Muhammad Ali taught everyone that conscience is more important than commerce,” he said. “He inspired blacks and whites to speak out for righteous causes and not be intimidated by anyone. He was a leading voice of protest for an entire generation, whether it was rejecting the Vietnam War or racial inequity.
“Muhammad [Ali] taught us to not settle but push ourselves to be our best. Finally, Muhammad [Ali] was a role model to both African-Americans and Muslim-Americans to be proud of our heritage, of our choices, and not let ourselves be bullied from our personal paths.”
