Marco Rubio is winning praise for a response he gave to Black Lives Matter on Fox News in August that went unnoticed at the time, but resurfaced on Twitter Wednesday.
“If [Rubio] talks this way consistently, he’ll win enough Latinos + African Americas to take the [White House],” The Atlantic writer and editor Peter Beinart tweeted, referring to the Fox News clip.
if @marcorubio talks this way consistently, he'll win enough Latinos + African Americans to take the WH http://t.co/HtMvTmqe5E
— Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) September 30, 2015
Added Vox: “Sen. Marco Rubio gave a surprisingly strong response to the issues raised by Black Lives Matter that showed he not only views racial disparities in the criminal justice system as a real issue, but actually understands the roots of the problem.”
When asked to comment on the movement, Rubio calls it “a legitimate issue,” in the clip.
“This is a legitimate issue,” Rubio says in the Fox News clip, when asked to comment on the movement. “It is a fact that in the African-American community around this country there has been, for a number of years now, a growing resentment toward the way law enforcement and the criminal justice system interacts with the community.”
Frequent interactions occur in large part because of things like the drug war. In the wake of the Baltimore riots, John McWhorter, an American Studies professor at Columbia University, wrote a piece for The Daily Beast in which he concludes its not racism which drives these interactions, but bad policy.
The drug war “assigns cops to black neighborhoods where, inevitably, encounters tend to be surly and often violent,” writes McWhorter. It also “created a black market alternative to legal work for poor black men underserved by bad schools.”
He finally credited a resurgence of a “Black Power ideology” and open-ended welfare’s effect on the family dynamic as reasons why black communities more often resort to violence.
The policies and the behaviors have had an effect on modern policing, one that’s perhaps not so healthy.
“Look, I personally know people who are professionals who are African American males, I have one friend in particular who’s been stopped in the last 18 months eight to nine different times,” he continued. “Never got a ticket for being stopped — just stopped. If that happened to me, after eight or nine times, you know I’d be wondering what’s going on here. I’d be upset about it. So would anybody else.”
“It is something we need to confront,” he added. “Because you have a significant percentage of our population that feels that they are locked out of the promise of this country, and the result is the anxiety and the frustration that you’re now seeing expressed.”
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