A few years ago, when I called Trump a racist, more than one fellow Quoran would ask me: how could he be a racist when he received a medal from the Ellis Island Society along with Muhammad Ali and Rosa Parks?

I had never heard of the Ellis Island Society, which right away tipped me off that maybe this wasn’t a particularly prestigious award. After all, don’t we hear about it when someone receives a Nobel Prize, a Kennedy Center Honor, an Academy Award, or a Medal of Honor? But the Ellis Island Society?

A Google search told me that the Ellis Island Honors Society (full name) was founded in 1986 to honor the contributions of immigrants to the United States. True, Trump was honored along with Ali and Parks — but so were 79 other people, and this was the Society’s first year of existence. It strikes me as an “Everybody gets a trophy” stunt, with celebrities chosen for their name recognition in order to drum up publicity for a brand-new organization.

And of course, Trump, Ali and Parks weren’t even immigrants. In fact, his award was described as in recognition of his real estate development career, which is ironic considering Trump’s longstanding policy of not renting or selling to nonwhites, which many of today’s immigrants are. It was definitely not in recognition of any efforts on his part to promote a multiracial and multicultural American society.