Masai Ujiri didn’t know what to say. He just didn’t. He kept quiet back in December when the New York Times reported that Donald Trump, the American President, had said that Haitians with U.S. visas “all had AIDS,” and that Nigerians in the United States would never “go back to their huts” once they saw America.Ujiri fumed. He was furious, frankly. He kept quiet.And then came Trump’s comments about Africa, made during a meeting this week over immigration policy at the White House. After arguing to keep Haiti out of a deal, Africa came up, and Trump said “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?”Ujiri didn’t want to stay quiet any longer.“We’re proud,” the Nigerian-born Toronto Raptors president said in a phone interview between scouting meetings. “Everybody’s put in different situations, but we’re proud of where we came from. My wife is from Guinea and Sierra Leone; she just came back from Sierra Leone. My dad is from Nigeria. My mom is from Kenya. I consider myself to be a son of Africa and a person of the world, and I want to raise my kids (to know) that there are no shitholes anywhere. There’s no shitholes anywhere in this world because we were born in different places for a reason.”“To think of Africa that way, or wherever is called that: Have you ever been? Have you ever visited? Have you ever seen these places? What do you know about these people that you call this? A lot of it to me is noise, and we need to think about who we’re listening to. What kind of leaders are we listening to? What kind of leader are we listening to? What are we following?”Ujiri, like everybody else, has watched what is happening in the United States in the past two years. He is an avid observer of politics, and he has spent time with leaders: Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau, Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria, Uhuru ...
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