Are Conservatives Coming to Terms With Racism in American Policing?
I’ve been too depressed to read much, but this is so worth it. (Thanks to Dorian Gray for the link)
And yet, two pieces of writing published on conservative news sites on Friday morning, as well as an extraordinary Facebook Live chat with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, suggest that the combination of Thursday night’s carnage and the police killings of two black men earlier in the week might be changing some minds on the right.
The comments made by Gingrich are arguably the most newsworthy:
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.
The Black Lives Matter movement, Gingrich said, should be seen as a “corrective” that “initially people reject because it’s not in their world.”
The former House Speaker’s remarks lit up social media, with many expressing disbelief that Newt Gingrich—the Personal Responsibility Act guy? The one angling for the VP slot on Donald Trump’s ticket?—would express such sentiments.
But Gingrich wasn’t the only conservative who was moved on Friday to break the rules of conservative discourse. Over at the Daily Caller, writer Matt K. Lewis wrote a post that opened with an unequivocal assertion: “[P]olice brutality toward African-Americans is a pervasive problem that has been going on for generations.” In the post, headlined “A confession,” Lewis grappled with the fact that, as a white person, he was raised to “reflexively believe the police” and “give them the benefit of the doubt,” while many black Americans have reasonably come to the conclusion that they and their children are “living under an occupying army.”
Lewis’s post ended with an expression of hope that videos of police encounters like the two that surfaced this week would cause “naive, white Americans” to start seeing the issue of police violence against blacks with less cloudy eyes.
One such white American has turned out to be Leon H. Wolf, managing editor of the website RedState.com. This morning, Wolf published what might be the most striking of all the conservative commentary we’ve seen on Dallas. In a post titled “The Uncomfortable Reason Why It Came To This In Dallas Yesterday,” Wolf argued that it was time to acknowledge not only the “lingering mistrust between police and minority communities,” but the fact that this mistrust is based on something real: namely, that “police often interact with minority communities in different ways than they do with the white community.”
“Look, I don’t know,” Wolf writes. “I don’t want to rush to judgment on either the Baton Rouge shooting or the Falcon Heights shooting, but based upon what we have seen, they look bad. Very bad.”
Wolf goes on to violate some basic orthodoxies of conservative commentary on law enforcement, criticizing commenters on his own website “who look for even the smallest hook on which to hang an excuse for the cops” whenever he posts a story about police violence, and questioning their “blind, uncritical belief that the police never (or only in freak circumstances) do anything wrong.”
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’ve copied a little too much to be “Fair Use” so be sure to hit this link and give Slate its rightful clicks.
While I welcome such constructive commentary from sources previously hostile to the rights of African Americans, I am bitterly disappointed at the price that was paid for this eliphany.
Right. Also I’m not sure I buy it.
@J “Right. Also I’m not sure I buy it.”
And even if they do, for how long? …maybe 4 days?
4 days sounds about right. I don’t see them sustaining this.
These comments/articles show how truly horrific this epidemic is.
The 1% is colorblind. They don’t care about the race of the people they exploit.
Racism was always a wedge used by the elite to gain electoral support (see: Southern Strategy, Reagan Philadelphia MS speech, Willie Horton ad, etc.). The minute racism becomes an electoral disadvantage it will be dropped by conservative politicians. But for most of the Republican base it is too deeply ingrained and will take a generation or more to recede.
Perhaps I am naive, but I am inclined to think that the epiphany is real. The frequent filming of police brutality makes the truth of racial profiling empirical and not a question of disputable assessment.
While acknowledgment of the problem is a crucial first step, the willingness to make the deep and sweeping changes to how policing is conducted and staffed to greatly ameliorate the problem is another matter. Near universal acceptance can become meaningless if it doesn’t lead to substantial change.
Are Conservatives Coming to Terms With Racism in American Policing?
No.
Sorry, Dorian, but while the epiphany of Newt and/or other highly placed conservatives may be real, movement conservatives, social conservatives, and Tea Partiers are out there in full force supporting our “heroes in blue” and blowing their racially toned dogwhistles as loud as possible.
Are they a diminishing demographic. Yes, but that good news is only tempered by the fact that they’ve diminished only into the tens of millions.
I meant “sorry, Dana” not Dorian.
So, Steve, are you suggesting that a change of heart from famous conservative “heroes” frequently declared and from many of them won’t have a corollary influence on many citizen conservatives?
Yes.
Okay, why do you think that?
Because the famous main-stream conservatives are no longer driving the train. George Will has dropped his GOP membership. Newt Gingrich is almost as irrelevant as it gets to the current GOP.
Social conservatives deserted John McCain in droves for some of the same sentiments–he may not survive his own party’s primary this year.
We have reached the point where people can no longer back down from their narratives even when those narratives are proven demonstrably wrong.
I guess I disagree that this group has the intellectual and psychological wherewithal to both generate and maintain against opposition its own narrative.