WASHINGTON _ Black leaders say the White House has not made engagement with them a priority, despite assertions from President Donald Trump and his coronavirus task force that COVID-19 is disproportionately impacting African American communities.
Conservatives are among those who are the most frustrated, telling McClatchy the White House should have worked harder to build up a robust network of black leaders it could tap into prior to the global health crisis.
That coalition should have included activists with longstanding ties to the Republican Party, they said, highlighting a deficiency that black conservatives have been warning the White House about since Trump's first year in office.
A single call for African American leaders in mid-April took place after a higher rate of infection in communities of color was already apparent, and participants said that Vice President Mike Pence and Surgeon General Jerome Adams each spoke but listeners were not given an opportunity to provide advice or ask questions.
Bob Woodson, the conservative leader of a group that promotes and financially assists black community leaders, said he would have told the White House _ had he been asked for his advice _ that Trump should mobilize veterans of the civil rights movement to take his coronavirus prevention message directly into black communities.
The Woodson Center founder said that black people are dying from coronavirus at a higher rate because of personal behavior that contributes to underlying health conditions that make people susceptible to the disease, including a flagrant disregard for social distancing guidelines in low-income communities.
"We are allowing political correctness to prevent us from being honest with a population of Americans," he said of White House messaging. "These are tough issues, but these are tough times."
Conservative and liberal leaders disagree about the reasons why the coronavirus is afflicting African Americans at a higher rate in states such as North Carolina, South Carolina and California that have released demographic data.
Conservatives are more likely to point to individual behavior and preexisting health conditions, while liberal leaders often cite systemic problems that keep African Americans from getting better jobs and improving their access to health care.
Center for Urban Renewal and Education founder Star Parker said individuals living in cities, where the disease is easily transmittable, especially those working in the service industry and other positions where they are at greater risk for exposure, should take the personal initiative to protect themselves.
Parker said that social distancing guidelines are hard to miss and yet she sees African Americans congregating in Washington, D.C, where her nonprofit is located, and has observed black employees who are not wearing masks or gloves in stores and with delivery services.
"You'd be hard pressed to live in America today and not realize that there's something going on in our country and that we need to be safe from a virus that has the potential to kill you," Parker said.
She also pushed for a frank discussion about the behavior, in order to save African American lives.
The surgeon general made a public appeal to the African American community to change behaviors at an April 10 news conference _ the same day he spoke to black leaders on the White House call.
Adams came under criticism during that briefing for singling out communities of color while he made an appeal to abstain from tobacco, drugs and alcohol. He asked viewers to follow social distancing guidelines for their "abuela," "granddaddy," "Big Mama" and "pop pop," using language that some found offensive, even though the black surgeon general said they are terms of endearment that are common within his family.
In an interview with McClatchy, the Rev. Al Sharpton said he spoke to Adams last week and told him he should have made the comments somewhere other than at the White House podium, with President Donald Trump, who has been accused of making racially insensitive comments in the past, looking over Adams' shoulder.
"I think that he had to understand the context of the criticism. I think that if he wanted to admonish blacks, he should have also admonished the government that neglects blacks. It should have been balanced," Sharpton, the National Action Network founder, said. "All of us admonish blacks to do different. But you cannot deal with it in an imbalanced way."
Evangelist Alveda King said liberal criticism of Adams' statement was hypocritical, because former President Barack Obama referenced "Cousin Pookie" in his campaigns to describe disaffected Democrats who would rather watch television than take the time to vote.
"Everybody thought that was wonderful. They laughed. 'Oh, he's down with us,' " the former Georgia state representative said. "So now when the surgeon general does the same thing, speaking with familiar terms of endearment to members of our family, he's totally criticized. I do not understand the double standard."
King said she has been on multiple coronavirus calls with the White House, including the one on which Adams and Pence spoke to African American leaders, and said she believes the White House had done a good job providing information to call participants on prevention methods.
On a call with faith leaders, she said the White House provided advice on how to apply for and take advantage of paycheck protection loans offered by the Small Business Administration.
Other black conservatives were less satisfied with White House outreach to black leaders.
Republican strategist Raynard Jackson excoriated the president's staff for failing to make a more concerted effort to include veteran activists who were tapped by previous Republican presidents to help with their black outreach efforts. He said the White House ought to reach out to African Americans who were party to previous Republican coalitions and reconnect with them.
"What this virus should convince the party of is the need to have ongoing relationships with black folks, even when there's not a crisis, even when there's no mass shooting, even when there's no drug bust. They should be doing this as a general principle, because it's necessary to have these lines of communication, whether there's a tragedy going on or whether there's not," he said. "And so, this, again, has been the party's Achilles' heel."
The White House pushed back on the characterizations of its outreach, saying it had held calls over the past month for black groups, including with the Congressional Black Caucus, African American mayors, medical professionals, nonprofits and officials from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Some calls had several thousand people on them, an official said.
Adams and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have also appeared on black media programs, the White House said.
Ja'Ron Smith, a deputy assistant to the president who works with minority groups, told McClatchy in response to the criticism that outreach to communities of color came about as a result of the Paycheck Protection Program.
"At the beginning, everyone was all hands on deck, trying to control the spread that was surging in some hot spots. Before we even knew the numbers on who this was affecting, that was our overall goal," he said.
"We realized the economic effects on distressed communities around the time when they were working through the PPP program, and we started doing outreach to specific groups across the board _ Hispanic groups, black groups, Native American groups," he said.
"While doing that, we started getting reports from African American stakeholders about the effect on the pandemic on the African American community. Ever since then, we've been engaging regularly with various coalitions," Smith said.
Jackson, who said he recently organized a call for black entrepreneurs with White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow, said the president has a good news story to tell on declining black unemployment numbers, as well as other policies that Trump has enacted to help minorities.
But black policy aides at the White House are not political strategists or communications professionals, so when they do engage with black leaders, he said, they too often turn to Democratic groups that routinely criticize the president.
Woodson was also critical of liberal activists the president has engaged with directly such as the Rainbow PUSH Coalition's Jesse Jackson and Sharpton, saying civil rights leaders who are not aligned with Trump or his policies should not serve as gatekeepers to the black community for the Republican administration.
Sharpton agreed that Trump should invite black Republicans to be part of the conversation. "When there is a problem, he ought to be talking to those who have credibility and standing in the areas where the problem is, including with some of the black Republicans," the host of "PoliticsNation" told McClatchy.
Sharpton said he had his differences with former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Republican President George W. Bush when they were in office. "But Clinton would invite all of us to the table, when we would deal with things, and made it clear from the beginning that he was going to do that. George Bush, the same thing. This president did not do that," Sharpton said.
"So he was caught with a pandemic that he was trying to act like would go away, and then he was caught with a racial divide in there with no legs on the ground in the black community to deal with this, to even get the intel," he added.
Sharpton said he has spoken to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows multiple times over the last month _ but that contact came about only after he placed a call to Trump to raise awareness about the threat of the coronavirus to the homeless and the incarcerated. He told the president the populations are especially vulnerable because they are unable to stay inside their homes for the duration of the virus.
"I said it's real simple, you got to go in where there is disproportionate pain," he said of his message to the White House. "If there is a disproportionate amount of blacks in a certain city, that's where you ought to have your focus in terms of where you are going to do your testing, and where you're gonna make sure your health care priorities are there, and that's where we've been pushing them on."
More than 4 million people in the United States have been tested for the coronavirus, the president said this week. The administration says all states will have access to the testing needed to reopen their economies 14 days after their number of recorded cases drops, in keeping with White House guidelines.
States with large populations of African Americans such as North Carolina say that testing continues to be a problem. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, said this week that health care workers do not have the personal protective equipment required to perform widespread testing.
North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams, a Democrat who represents Charlotte, told McClatchy that testing will help African Americans who do have the virus know they need to quarantine or get medical attention. She said the coronavirus "does not have to be a death sentence" for people who contract it, even if they do have respiratory diseases and other preexisting health conditions.
"We have the largest number of individuals who are getting sick and dying from this coronavirus. I think the task force has not placed enough emphasis on testing," she said. "But these disparities demonstrate to us the ongoing issues that we need to guarantee access to health care for people of color. The task force needs to take some tailored steps to address these large amounts of deaths in the black community."
Trump at a weekend news conference announced that his administration would be funding "13,000 community health center sites and mobile medical stations" equipped with the "most advanced and robust testing capabilities."
He did not say where the testing sites would be, however he said that 28 million people, including many African American and Hispanic communities, in underserved urban and rural areas would have access to them.
"We're taking care of them. And it's so important, because you've all been reading about the disproportionate numbers on African American, and you're reading a little bit less about Hispanic, but likewise Hispanic communities," he said. "The numbers are disproportionate. In fact, we're doing big studies on it right now. We don't like it. Not right."
The Health and Human Services Department did not respond to a request for additional information on the initiative. The White House has not provided the data on minority communities and the coronavirus that the president referred to or outlined a strategy to cut down on the rate of infections in those populations.
Alma Adams, the North Carolina congresswoman, pushed back at conservatives, saying everyone needs to adhere to social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of the disease.
"I've seen a lot of white folks out on the beach and doing other kinds of things. So I don't think we have to just say that black folks need to take personal responsibility. Everybody needs to do that," she said. "We are in this together, and that means we have to solve this together."
She added, "I say everybody needs to take personal responsibility."
