For 14-year-old Yusuf Dayur, hearing news of vulgar comments about Africa uttered by President Trump bothered him enough that he had a tough time focusing on studying for his upcoming chemistry exam.
“Mom, do you know what our president said about Africa?” the ninth-grader from Richfield asked his mother Shukri Abukar.
Yusuf wanted to say something about Trump’s dismissal of Haiti and nations in Africa as “sh!thole countries.” That was on Jan. 11 and the president’s comments had sparked a wave of shock and outrage around the world.
“How could he say such a thing about Africa when the house he lives in was made by Africans who were enslaved,” he said of the president. “Africa is where people came from. Africa is what America was built on. Africa is the world.”
“I think it was very arrogant and very uneducated of him to say that about African nations,” he said.
If he didn’t respond to the president’s comments, he told his mother, “it will bother me for the rest of my life.” Two days later, he found some down time after he came back from a weekend Quranic school. “Hooyo,” he said, using the Somali word for mom, “grab the phone. I’m recording a video.”
Trump has since offered a partial public denial, while privately defending his language.
In the two-minute long video that’s received over 11,000 Facebook views, Yusuf admonished the president for disparaging black nations.
“I do not think calling other people’s countries s-hole nations, I don’t think that is what America stands for,” Yusuf said. “America stands for liberty and justice for all. America stands for people coming from all over the world to help contribute to our nation’s great success.“