April 30, 2017
Booed in Berline
By Dr. E. Faye Williams, Esq.
(TriceEdneyWire.com) - By now, those who read my articles know that I am a person of Faith. My Faith informs my decisions and provides guidance to my life and my actions. Two of the Faith principles upon which most of my personal decisions rest are: 1) Let us not love with words or speech, but with actions and in truth (1 John 3:18); and 2) (the axiom) I'd rather see a sermon than to hear one any day. Of all the ethical constructs known to humankind, truth and honesty are the most important to me.
As much as I demand truth and honesty from myself, I demand truth and honesty from those who control, aspire to control or wish to participate in the control of the steerage of government. Thanks to the current President, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, has been placed front-and-center as a high-level representative of the US Government and as the most intimate of policy advisors to the President. Unfortunately for the Nation, while Ivanka Trump, a highly privileged young woman, presents a less frenetic, less pathological image of misrepresented facts, she nonetheless distorts the truth as much as her father and those who support him.
Her perceived penchant for distorting the truth was highlighted on April 25th when she was booed and jeered by some in the audience at a panel discussion in Germany related to the empowerment of women. The source of the audience's hostility was based in her attempt to present her father as a champion of working-class women and families. Most outside of the Trump-circle of politics see this characterization of her father as a monumental contradiction of the facts.
Few will deny that Ivanka has the full faith and confidence of her father. Nor can it be denied that she has an elevated platform and great opportunity to steer her father in the right direction on equality for women. During the presidential campaign, she spoke idealistically on such issues as fair pay, safe workplaces for women, affordable childcare, and paid family leave; yet we have seen nothing from the Trump administration that acknowledges concern or intent to act on these issues.
Ivanka claims to be a feminist; yet, through her silence, condones and gives approval to her father's bad acts against women through the years. She offered no opposition to her father's praise of serial sexual predator, Bill O'Reilly. She listens to the inflammatory rhetoric of her father's tirades; yet we see no moderation in his tone or temperament indicating she gets credit for her influence on her father, but we don’t see evidence of that influence. This leaves one to wonder if she even tries to influence him and steer him in a more favorable direction.
There is a contradiction between her words and deeds. As her business interests extend beyond US borders, so should her humanitarian concerns - but, they don't. The Washington Post reports that workers in Chinese factories that produce her fashion line and associated brands work for little more than one dollar an hour. The worker's 60 hour work-week yields around $62.00. These "slave wages" source a large portion of Ivanka's multi-million dollar business! Those who make her clothing can never afford to buy them, and one wonders how they live on such meager pay as Ivanka, an already highly privileged woman, gets richer and richer.
Can anyone recall Trump’s interest in "Make America Great Again," the "Buy American, Hire American," or the "America First" mantras issued from the Trump camp for months? Ivanka’s off-shore business interests show Ivanka to be a hypocrite in the same vein as her father - talking loud and doing nothing.
Someone once said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
(Dr. E. Faye Williams, President of the National Congress of Black Women. 202/678-6788 www.nationalcongressbw.org.)