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Article snippet: WASHINGTON — Kara Young, a model who dated Donald J. Trump for two years before he married another model named Melania Knauss, remembers clearly bringing up her race with the real estate tycoon early in their relationship. As with so many issues, he steered the conversation to celebrity. “I didn’t hide my race from Donald Trump. He knew,” Ms. Young said in a rare interview. “He would say, ‘You’re like Derek Jeter.’ And I would say, ‘Exactly.’” “I never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race of people,” she added. The furor that Mr. Trump has created with his equivocation over the violence this weekend at a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., has refocused attention on the president’s relationship with matters of race. Long before he embarked on his improbable political career, he had courted racial controversy, calling for the death penalty for five black and Latino teens who were later shown to have been wrongly convicted of a rape in Central Park, settling a Justice Department suit that charged the family business with housing discrimination and falsely accusing the nation’s first black president of being born in Kenya. Beyond dating a biracial woman, he made outsize efforts to hang out publicly with African-American celebrities: the boxing promoter Don King, the hip-hop impresarios Kanye West, Russell Simmons and Sean Combs, and celebrities as big as Muhammad Ali, James Brown and Michael Jackson. But more than ever, the question is b... Link to the full article to read more