Sen. Mitt Romney stood alone among elected Republicans (as he often does these days) when, on Sunday, he tweeted the phrase “black lives matter.”
It is not hard to find Republicans condemning what happened to George Floyd and voicing support for peaceful protests. And it was just a few months ago (months that now feel like an eternity) that President Trump used his expensive Super Bowl ad time to tout criminal justice reform policies.
But part of what made Romney’s statement so notable is that he chose to say the words — “black lives matter” — that have become the hallmark of protests that have swept the nation.
Whether out of fear of saying the wrong thing, a belief that to speak up would be mere “virtue-signaling,” opposition to policies endorsed by movement groups, or a feeling that the phrase itself is divisive, the words “black lives matter” are absent among statements made by Republican elected leaders.
“Black lives matter” rose to national prominence in 2014 in the wake of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But in the absence of video of the incident, controversy around what had happened threatened to overshadow debate about what should be done next.
What happened in 2020 to Floyd was documented in nearly nine minutes of horrific footage that left what happened undeniable. With the exception of the ghoulish grifters intent on dragging a dead man’s name through the mud, nearly all attest that what happened to Floyd was a ghastly injustice, that there is no justification for what millions of people across the United States have seen with their own eyes.
Initially, the pushback to saying “black lives matter” was to profess “all lives matter,” a statement that seemed self-evidently praiseworthy and obvious. But “all lives matter” clearly rings hollow to those for whom “all men are created equal” did not apply from the moment it was enshrined in our nation’s founding documents.
While today there seems to be a greater understanding of why “all lives matter” is inadequate, many of those who are nevertheless reluctant to say “black lives matter” are instead opting to say nothing. Or if they do say something, it takes the form of a statement on which nearly everyone can agree: condemn what happened, condemn looting and violence, move on.
But we should not move on. We should stay upset about the deaths of Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. We should stay upset about the deaths of David Underwood and David Dorn, two black men who were killed while guarding a federal building and a store, respectively, during the protests. We should be heartbroken that black parents need to have “the talk” with their children about how to handle encounters with police because too many, as Sen. Tim Scott put it, “have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness, and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than being just yourself.”
We should be upset and heartbroken that inequities still exist in America and should not shy away from confronting the causes of those inequities and addressing them. To do so is not to be anti-America; to the contrary, we should expect the highest and best from ourselves and challenge our country to do better constantly.
It is easy to say what happened to Floyd was wrong or to celebrate something such as the overdue ousting of Rep. Steve King, a sitting member of the Republican conference in Congress who just last year lamented that the term “white supremacist” was considered a bad thing.
It is harder and more uncomfortable to confront the reality that there are still too many who, explicitly or implicitly, believe that white people are somehow inherently better or smarter or more virtuous than black people. This isn’t just about people with swastika tattoos or tiki torches, but it is also about a latent view that says disparities in black student achievement or black incarceration may just be inevitable or self-inflicted, a view that dismisses the notion that there are large obstacles to progress that are the persistent legacy of a time not long ago when black children were not even allowed to share a school with white children.
And if you believe these gaps and disparities are not inevitable, if you do believe that “nature hath endowed genius and virtue” equally among those of all races, of all walks of life, then fight for a better way forward.
That does not obligate you to embrace uncritically every policy that activists prescribe, such as the “police-free future” that is being touted in Minneapolis. It means taking time to listen, to examine your principles, and then apply them to achieving greater justice and equality. Push ever more forcefully for policies that will keep children of color from being trapped in bad schools. Make the same calls for transparency and accountability to law enforcement that you expect of other public sector unions, such as teacher unions. Question how and why we incarcerate so many of our fellow Americans.
Some leaders of the Republican Party of the past are speaking out, such as George W. Bush calling for the “end of systemic racism.” One hopes that those on track to lead us in the future will also rise to this moment.
