An activist scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention once said she wouldn’t be mad if law enforcement interacted with her biracial son differently than how they would with her white children.
Abby Johnson, a Planned Parenthood employee-turned-anti-abortion activist who will speak at the RNC on Tuesday, said in a video she posted on YouTube in June that a police officer racially profiling her adopted biracial son, Jude, would be “smart,” according to the Daily Caller. She said in the now-deleted video that she doesn’t get mad at the idea because she prioritizes “statistics over emotion.”
“Statistically, I look at our prison population, and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes,” she said. “So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
“So the fact that in his head, he would be more careful around my brown son than my white son, that doesn’t actually make me angry. That makes that police officer smart, because of statistics,” Johnson added, but she noted that it would make her “angry” if the officer treats her biracial son “more violently” than her white children.
The activist also noted that Jude could grow up to be “a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking, maybe, brown man” while “my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”
Racial inequality and law enforcement use of force have risen to become leading national issues following the deaths Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, which galvanized millions of people to protest despite restrictions implemented to stop the spread of the coronavirus. More demonstrations have taken place after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Johnson was the subject of the nonfiction movie Unplanned, which tells the true story of how she went from a former Planned Parenthood clinic director to a leading anti-abortion advocate.
