Jemele Hill stirred controversy with a statement on supporters of President Donald Trump , saying that anyone who votes for him in the upcoming presidential election is racist.
The former ESPN commentator-turned-writer for The Atlantic shared the message on Twitter , saying it should be clear that anyone still supporting the president must be racist as well.
“If you vote for Donald Trump, you are a racist. You have no wiggle room,” Hill wrote.
The statement drew some immediate viral interest, with Hill’s name shooting to the top of Twitter’s trends on the late afternoon on Sunday, just hours after it was posted. It generated more than 140,000 likes and close to 30,000 retweets, with many praising Hill for the statement.
Some pushed back against the message, chiding Hill for painting all of Trump’s supporters with such a wide brush. She responded to one critic who said that calling them names would only embolden Trump supporters and make them stronger in their backing of the president.
“Don’t make my tweet the reason you’re voting for a racist, because if based off all he’s done, all it takes for a tweet to make you more convicted about Trump, then you wanted to vote for him regardless,” she tweeted in reply. “Just admit you like the bigotry and racism.”
But many others defended the message, taking note of the racially charged stances that the president has taken.
“If Jemele Hill’s tweet made you mad today, how mad did it make you when YOUR president called Black Lives Matter a ‘symbol of hate’? Or when he called Mexicans ‘rapists’?” read one of the top replies to Hill’s statement. “Or when questioned about black people being killed by the police, he said ‘so do white people’?”
Hill is no stranger to controversy when it comes to Trump, especially when it comes to allegations of racism. In 2017, she referred to Trump as a white supremacist and said that he surrounds himself with other white supremacists. The comment reportedly violated ESPN’s policies against political discussions on social media, and the Trump administration called for Hill to be fired.
Hill was not fired at the time, rather serving a suspension, but eventually left the network when she refused to back away from her politics. The following year, ESPN reportedly bought out her $2.5 million contract.
Others have accused Trump of racism, especially as it relates to some past attacks on prominent Black athletes. That included an attack on NBA star LeBron James’s intelligence.
