In the wake of heightened tension between the African-American community and U.S. law enforcement after a number of shootings, it’s very easy to consider it as a partisan divide.
Those aligned with Black Lives Matter are imagined to be anti-cop, and Republicans, by virtue of being conservative, are assumed to be pro-cop.
Republican Senator Tim Scott, from South Carolina, is one of only two African-Americans in the United States Senate. He’s an aggressive conservative – both fiscally and socially – and his election was championed by the ultra right-wing Tea Party movement.
But Scott knows what it’s like to be black and facing police. He delivered a pretty compelling address from the Senate floor about being targeted by police, even after his election as a Senator. It’s long but worth it:
“I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist,” he said. “To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”
Scott discusses how a Capitol Police officer stopped him and challenged his member’s pin, saying “The pin, I know. You, I don’t.” He says that he has been stopped by police seven times in the one year.
He concedes on several of those incidents he was speeding. The others, he says, were for “nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighbourhood or some other reason just as trivial.”
You’re not going to get ALL COPS ARE BASTARDS rhetoric from a Republican senator. That’s just not gonna happen. But it’s worth pondering that even a hard right-wing, Evangelical conservative senator can be candid about his bad experiences with cops.
Source: YouTube.
Photo: Getty Images.
