Many conservatives used last week’s incidents of police brutality and the massacre of five police officers in Dallas to point fingers and score political points. But Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., showed a flash of why some once saw him as the future of the Republican Party, and why many may do so again soon.
During a press conference on July 8, Rubio said that anyone who is not black will “never fully understand the experience of being black in America, but we should all understand why our fellow Americans in the African American community are angry.” Rubio acknowledged that much progress has been made in race relations over the last few decades, but that “millions of our fellow Americans feel they are treated differently, and they are scared.”
He made clear that police officers have difficult jobs, that sometimes they make mistakes and that much of how we talk about race and policing is overly politicized and thus unhelpful to finding solutions. “I think all of us in public life, the president included, should reexamine everything we’ve said to see if in our public discourse we’ve contributed in any way.”
Rubio acknowledged the anger about the shootings but said that we should resist the temptation to “feed this anger through posts on social media and careless words,” and that even though Americans don’t see eye to eye on the causes of the violence, we should come together because we all want the same solution.
Rubio’s response was balanced and nuanced, and it evinced sympathy for people on both sides of the debate. It was, in other words, refreshing. Typically when tragedy strikes, conservatives and liberals retreat to their respective ideological corners and start casting blame.
Rubio didn’t do that. But he did state a fact that too few conservatives acknowledge: That most white people don’t understand what life is like for black people.
To get a clue, one must spend real time with people of color, getting close enough that you can have meaningful discussions about sensitive issues and perhaps even witness firsthand some of the prejudice, discrimination and racism so many blacks experience.
Unfortunately, most white people never get that close. A 2014 study from the Public Religion Research Institute found that three quarters of whites don’t have any black friends. It’s a product of the political, religious, economic and social sorting that occurs in modern society.
Contrast Rubio’s response to that of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said, “When you say black lives matter, that’s inherently racist.” Giuliani’s response shows that he just doesn’t get it.
The name of the movement isn’t “Black Lives Matter and White Lives Don’t” or “Black Lives Matter More Than White Lives.” The slogan is a recognition and a reminder that for centuries in this country, black lives didn’t matter as much as white lives, and that currently the lives being extinguished in disproportionate numbers by agents of government authority are black ones.
Under the Constitution an African American slave was originally counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of calculating a state’s electoral vote count. The Dred Scott Supreme Court case ruled that black people have no rights white people are bound to respect. The Jim Crow laws in the South (which ended just 50 years ago) were based on the idea that blacks were inherently inferior to whites.
For centuries in this country, for people of color, the police were not authority figures to be trusted and respected but agents of oppression to be feared and avoided. This is largely no longer the case, but the effects linger. According to Gallup, whites are more than twice as likely as blacks to rate the honesty of police officers as very high or high.
Spend significant time with a person of color, and it won’t take long to realize that things still are not equal. Often times, the discrimination that occurs is much more subtle than it once was, but it still exists.
By acknowledging that the issues surrounding race and policing are more complicated and complex than so many pundits acknowledge, Marco Rubio has done a service to the truth, not to mention his future political prospects.
Keep talking like this, Sen. Rubio, and you just might end up president one day — after the Trump delirium passes.
Daniel Allott is deputy commentary editor for the Washington Examiner
