At the end of the first season of his reality TV show The Apprentice, Donald Trump’s choice of a winner was a matter of black and white.

And according to a former producer, Trump did not mince words about who the winner would be. In an essay for Slate, Bill Pruitt recalls how Trump, just as brash and whiny decades ago as he is now, openly used the N-word to refer to the first season’s Black finalist and was dead set against crowning him the victor.

The contestant in question was Kwame Jackson, a Black Wall Street banker who worked at Goldman Sachs, Pruitt writes. In the final episode of season one, Jackson was pitted against Bill Rancic, a white entrepreneur from Chicago who owned a cigar business, and they were tasked with managing two separate events at Trump properties. Pruitt writes that while the producers were legally barred from telling Trump which contestant to choose as the winner, they skirted a Federal Communications Commission penalty by having weekly backroom sessions with the billionaire, all recorded on tape, in which they weighed the pros and cons of each.