House speaker Paul Ryan, Senator Marco Rubio, and other leading Republicans spoke in unusually frank terms about race Friday, following a string of fatal confrontations involving black men and law enforcement that have claimed seven lives this week.
“Every member of this body wants a world in which people feel safe regardless of the color of their skin. And that’s not how people are feeling these days,” Ryan said on the House floor.
Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black male, was shot and killed by police outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge after law enforcement responded to a 911 call reporting him with a gun. Sterling was selling CDs and was approached by a homeless man, whom he turned away by showing the firearm, according to a CNN report. And in Minnesota, Philando Castile, 32, was shot dead by police behind the wheel of a vehicle during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights outside St. Paul on Wednesday. Parts of both incidents were captured on video.
The violent week culminated with a sniper attack on Dallas police officers during a protest Thursday night, which claimed the lives of five people in uniform and wounded seven others.
The bloody events, occurring in quick succession, have restarted the national debate about the black community’s relationship with law enforcement—a debate in which prominent GOP politicians began to take part Friday.
“Those of us who are not African American will never fully understand the experience of being black in America. But we should all understand why our fellow Americans in the black community are angry at the images of an African-American man, with no criminal record, who was pulled over for a busted tail light, slumped in his car seat and dying while his four-year-old daughter watches from the back seat,” Florida senator Marco Rubio said during a Friday press conference, in particular reference to Castile’s death.
“All of us should be troubled by these images. And all of us need to acknowledge that this is about more than just one or two recent incidents. The fact is that there are communities in America where black families tell us that they are fearful of interacting with their local law enforcement. How they feel is a reality that we cannot and should not ignore. And as we work through this it will require us to ask and to answer some very difficult and uncomfortable questions.”
Many of those questions have asked about policy matters at varying levels of government, from gun control to police body cameras. Friday, however, many politicians focused squarely on the state of black America, an issue not typically broached by Republicans.
“It’s more dangerous to be black in America,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich said during a Facebook Live chat. “It’s both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story, but it is more dangerous in that you’re substantially more likely to be in a situation where police don’t respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it’s difficult to appreciate how real that is.”
South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the only black member of the U.S. Senate and a Republican, saw his native North Charleston affected by the fatal shooting of Walter Scott, a black man, by a white police officer after a traffic stop in April 2015. The policeman, Michael Slager, was indicted by a state grand jury on a count of murder that June.
“America is a beautiful portrait of diversity, and part of that picture is understanding how our neighbors see the world,” Scott wrote on Friday. “I’ve often described our nation as a patchwork quilt. These patches are black and white; red and brown; woven together by this notion of freedom and love. We have to look within ourselves to find the resources necessary to treat others as we would have them treat us.”
