SD: We’re more than two years from Ferguson. It’s not enough to say, ‘Hey, we might have implicit bias in our police department.’ The conversation is getting started, but that’s about it.
I hear people talking about it as well and it’s very problematic, but I see very few police departments or even regular places of employment actually doing the work to address it, solve it, propose substantive solutions - that’s what bothers me. SK: I do think everybody brings levels of bias to their profession and life and work. SD: When confronted with evidence of racial bias, police often argue that their officers are not racist, but rather suffering from implicit bias. Our conversations about race are way too simple and our solutions to a lot of problems don’t fit in a tweet. When I’m speaking about what white privilege means, it’s not them I have in mind, but so many other people who do benefit from that. When you are poor and white and struggling and you hear me talk about white privilege your assumption may be I’m talking specifically about you - and that’s not always the case. There’s a real misunderstanding when a guy like me or anybody talks about white privilege. Race and racial issues divide these groups in ways that they just shouldn’t. Because of the way our country is, they aren’t enemies so much as they are strangers. Bernie resonated deeply across the country with poor white people particularly in rural states.
SK: That’s part of why I was behind Bernie Sanders, because I saw what I thought was the road map to how you bring together marginalized groups of people that have way more in common than even they may understand and appreciate. And I don’t think most of them feel particularly privileged about their station in life, and they probably share a lot of concerns about modern policing that Black Lives Matter activists are talking about. SD: I cover the criminal justice system here, which means I encounter a lot of poor white people. I hear a lot of activists say we’re all looking forward to the presidential race being over because we feel like it dominates the news cycle in so many ways that the country will be able to talk about more substance. We’ve struggled to get these presidential candidates to talk about it in any serious way, but that’s no different than any mainstream issue right now. For most mainstream Democrats and virtually all Republicans, law enforcement and their families and supporters are still a part of their voting base and they refuse to talk tough about it. The few times the presidential candidates have talked about it, it’s been a pretty one-dimensional conversation. Seven Days: Has this election season made the national conversation about race and police better or worse? The conversation was edited for clarity and brevity. King spoke with Seven Days ahead of a talk he is scheduled to give at Middlebury College on Tuesday at 7 p.m. King was also a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Vermont senator’s presidential campaign. New York Daily News senior justice writer Shaun King has emerged as a leading voice in the Black Lives Matter movement and a must-read on criminal justice issues.
0 kommentar(er)
