By Yamicha Alcindor & Maggie Haberman @ NYTimes.com, Aug. 17

WASHINGTON — Kara Young, a biracial 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 complex relationship with matters of race. Long before he embarked on his improbable political career, he had courted racial controversy [....]

[....] more than ever, the question is being asked: Is Mr. Trump personally racist?

The few African-Americans in his inner circle respond with an emphatic no. Most privately describe him as a 71-year-old man with fixed views and a cloistered history, raised in a heavily white enclave in Queens, who came of age and built a tower in the Manhattan sky when New York City was roiling with racial strife [....]