The most pleasantly surprising response to the recent racial tensions came from Newt Gingrich, while he was participating in a Facebook live chat:
It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this. If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.
I applaud him for this statement — it is a good first step.
I also want to applaud statements from other conservatives, including from Leon Wolf, the managing editor of RedState, titled “The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas Yesterday“. Or from Matt Lewis on the Daily Caller, who wrote “In the era of Facebook Live and smart phones, it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than the fact that police brutality toward African-Americans is a pervasive problem that has been going on for generations.”
An article in Slate concludes:
It is surprising and intriguing to see such rhetoric from the right, especially on the day after the murder of five police officers. It’s enough to make you think even the most sturdy-seeming ideologies can be dislodged in times of crisis—and that, as horrendously sad as this week has been, it may end up being some sort of turning point.
I sincerely hope that this is a turning point.
2 Comments
Good statements, although I feel they are politically motivated (specially by redstate). They are crying why Donald Trump has become the nominee, while for years of my reading their website, they promote hatred (especially towards muslims, their reactions would have been drastically different had it been a muslim shooting cops). They know they need blacks and latinos to win elections so their criticisms or articles against them are getting milder (not so year or two years ago).
What Newt said is factually and genuinely true. As a non-black immigrant I have no idea or very limited idea what blacks go through. Of course killing unarmed (or legally armed) blacks give me clear indications. But then there are issues I am fundamentally against (affirmative action) because I always felt that being immigrant and not knowing much about society and functioning of anything here put me in severe disadvantage compared to a black person born and lived and grew up here. And I know immigrants (blacks) from Africa who have more or less same opinions about native blacks.
Yeah, it may be politically motivated, but I don’t mind too much as long as they keep doing it.
Did you see all the responses to Newt on Facebook, basically attacking him? I didn’t want to mention that in the post because I wanted to stay positive. But it shows that it is still a brave thing for Newt and RedState to say things like that, even if it is for political reasons.