Noted sports media figure Jason Whitlock said during an interview this week that growing up in a black working-class environment he was surrounded by people who really supported former President Donald Trump’s agenda, even if they “didn’t know it.”
My mother was a factory worker, my dad didn’t graduate high school. But eventually, he started a barbershop and then eventually a bar, tavern in the inner city — like a Black ‘Cheers’,” Whitlock told Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Wednesday, a reference to the 1980s sitcom.
“People find it confusing when I say it, but it’s like I grew up around Black Trump supporters. They didn’t know it, but they were just like Trump supporters — working-class, worried about their families, just want to work hard and create space for themselves to be happy in America,” he added.
He added that he feels most comfortable around folks like that and that he fondly remembered his father’s saloon in Indianapolis as a place to take some “elites” in the sportswriting world.
“I can remember Indiana University’s head coach Mike Davis at one time he came down to my dad’s bar. It was always– I try to bring my friends or the people I’ve met down to the Masterpiece Lounge to let them hang with some real people, some real brothers I would say,” he said.
“And that’s kind of been my spirit and one of the things, one of the biggest lessons I took from my dad,” he continued.
“In America, you can create your own space, you can create your own happiness. You don’t have to work for people you don’t want to work for, you don’t have to deal with people you don’t want,” Whitlock noted.