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A Black Republican Tackles The Police ‘Trust Gap’

A Black Republican Tackles The Police ‘Trust Gap’

Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina was still learning the ways of Washington, he says, when he saw a police officer following his car near Capitol Hill.

“I took a left…,” he recalled in a speech Wednesday on the Senate floor, “and as soon as I took a left, a police officer pulled in right behind me.”

That was his first left turn. His second came at a traffic signal. The patrol car was still following him. Scott took a third left onto the street that led to his apartment complex.

It was his fourth left, turning into his apartment complex, that brought the blue lights on. “The officer approached the car,” Scott recalled, “and said that I did not use my turn signal on the fourth turn. Keep in mind, as you might imagine, I was paying very close attention to the law enforcement officer who followed me on four turns. Do you really think that somehow I forget to use my turn signal on that fourth turn? Well, according to him, I did.”

Oh, did I mention that Tim Scott is African-American? He’s the only black Republican in the Senate and the first to be elected from the South since 1881.

He did not get there by being a liberal or a Black Lives Matter radical. He’s a “pro-life,” anti-Obamacare and NRA-endorsed conservative.

He is also, whatever else you may think of his politics — which are more conservative than mine — a very likeable and thoughtful businessman from North Charleston whose family, as he likes to say with patriotic pride, “went from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”

Yet, issues such as police conduct and public safety have become personal for Scott. It was in his hometown, North Charleston, S.C., last year that a cellphone video showed Walter Scott (no relation), an unarmed 50-year-old black man, shot to death by a police officer from whom he was running away.

Two months later a gunman fatally shot nine people, including friends of Scott, at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Scott calls for a halt to abuses by police, but he also wants fairness for police and improved law enforcement.

One tragedy illustrated the dangers of bad policing. The other illustrated why we need good police.

So when Scott stood on the Senate floor to declare and decry a “trust gap” between law enforcement officers and black communities, he was worth hearing.

“Please remember that, in the course of one year, I’ve been stopped seven times by law enforcement officers,” Scott declared in the widely covered and retweeted speech. “Not four, not five, not six but seven times in one year as an elected official.

“Was I speeding sometimes? Sure. But the vast majority of the time, I was pulled over for nothing more than driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood or some other reason just as trivial.

“I do not know many African-American men who do not have a very similar story to tell,” said Scott, “no matter the profession, no matter their income, no matter their disposition in life.”

A young former staffer of Scott’s grew so frustrated over being stopped by District of Columbia police, the senator said, that he replaced the car with “a more obscure form of transportation. He was tired of being targeted.”

“There is absolutely nothing more frustrating, more damaging to your soul,” said Scott, “than when you know you’re following the rules and being treated like you are not.”

On that note, Scott asked for nothing in his speech, except empathy, a sincere effort to understand what others are going through — which in itself is asking a lot from some people.

“Today,” he said, “I simply ask you this: Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean that it does not exist. To ignore their struggles, our struggles, does not make them disappear. It simply leaves you blind and the American family very vulnerable.”

Well said. Folks who respond to complaints of racial discrimination by police by bringing up black-on-black crime need to hear what Tim Scott is trying to tell them. Fighting crime without fighting police misconduct leads to more crime. We need to get rid of both.

What Brexit Means To US? Another Trumpian Victory

What Brexit Means To US? Another Trumpian Victory

Many people see striking similarities between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Great Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. One of those people is Donald Trump.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee just happened to arrive in Scotland to reopen a golf resort as the news of the “Brexit,” or “British exit” vote, came in. Unsurprisingly he took him no time at all to make the story all about himself.

“They took back control of their country,” said Trump when asked about the British vote. “It’s a great thing.”

“People are angry, all over the world, they’re angry,” he said. “They’re angry over borders, they’re angry over people coming into the country and taking over. Nobody even knows who they are. They’re angry about many, many things.”

And Trump has been doing all he can to make them angrier by peppering his observations with outlandish exaggeration. But his notions that immigrants are “taking over” and “nobody even knows who they are” captures a widespread discontent that will not be constrained by mere facts.

Troubled by economic shocks in the Euro zone, waves of refugees from the Middle East, the resurgence of far-right xenophobic nationalism and resentments over seemingly being bossed around by the EU headquarters in Brussels, a new neo-tribal nationalism has boiled up in European politics and to a lesser degree in the United States since the global economic meltdown of 2008.

Trump’s signature issues (a wall on the Mexican border, higher tariffs and the expulsion of millions of undocumented immigrants, etc.) were widely viewed as loony beyond-the-fringe extremism when conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan voiced them in his 1992 Republican presidential campaign. Today, much to the consternation of the Grand Old Party’s more pragmatic leaders, the old Buchananism has become mainstream Republicanism — trumpeted by Trump.

What, we Americans wonder, does Brexit mean for us? Or for Trump or his presumptive Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton?

In the short term, expect the British pound to be buffeted amid global uncertainty, which financial markets hate. Flight from the pound inflates the value of the dollar, but that can dampen our trade advantage. The EU is like a marriage: hard to endure sometimes but also painful to leave.

Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay, a sign of how much they expected Brexit to hurt their economies. Prime Minister David Cameron, a strong opponent of Brexit, resigned after his anti-Brexit fight failed. He is expected to be replaced by another popular conservative, Boris Johnson, former mayor of London.

The former newspaper columnist raised a fuss in April with a newspaper column that described President Barack Obama as “the part-Kenyan president” who may have “an ancestral dislike of the British Empire.” That didn’t help his Brexit movement allies who were denying that racism had anything to do with their rejection of the EU. I am sure that Johnson and Trump would have a lot to share about race relations.

Economics matter, but racism and other xenophobia typically play a role whenever politics mix with questions of national ethnic identity.

Marine Le Pen of France’s far-right, anti-immigration National Front applauded the Brexit vote as signaling a “new air” of patriotism. She also called it a “springtime for the people,” which brings to my mind uncomfortable memories of Mel Brooks’ dark comedy “The Producers” and its signature song, “Springtime for Hitler.”

But if Boris Johnson does become prime minister, he faces big headaches from his fellow members of parliament who are furious with him and the Brexit movement for the economic chaos the vote is certain to bring. He also faces the demands of an impatient electorate that expects to see some positive long-term results from that short-term chaos.

We Americans look on, as the old understatement goes, with great interest. History often shows a remarkable similarity in the political trends of the U.S. and UK. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher sounded like soulmates as they led conservative swings in the 1980s. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did the same in the other direction in the 1990s, promoting “third way” policies between the right and left.

Now we see Brexit rising simultaneously with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Both can be seen as reactions to a changing world. Both are supported mainly by voters who are older, whiter, less urban and more likely to have been buffeted by wage stagnation and economic dislocation.

Those are issues that we hope will be addressed by traditional sensible politicians, before it’s too late.

 

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

Photo: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump waves as he arrives at his Turnberry golf course, in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain June 24, 2016. REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Hot 2015 Words? A Political ‘ism’ Vision

Hot 2015 Words? A Political ‘ism’ Vision

What’s the word? The “Word of the Year” at Oxford Dictionaries is not even a word. It is an emoji, a digital image that is used in text messages to express an idea or emotion in a style that seems in my eyes to be aimed illiterates.

Oxford Dictionaries justified this selection by citing an explosion in “emoji culture” over the last year and not, as I fear, a collapse in the public’s desire to read.

“It’s flexible, immediate and infuses tone beautifully,” said Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries in a statement. “As a result emoji are becoming an increasingly rich form of communication, one that transcends linguistic borders.”

Indeed, I’m sure that’s true, provided that you can figure out what the darn emoji means. The emoji that Oxford Dictionaries happened to choose is hardly a model of simplicity or clarity.

Titled “face with tears of joy,” it depicts a gleefully cheerful smiley face with enormous water drops exploding out of its eyes. Cute, but it’s nowhere near the “rich form of communication” displayed by what has become known as the “poop emoji” in polite company. It depicts a steaming brown coil of the stuff with enough clarity to require no further translation.

But as an indicator of the social, political and economic world in which I usually work, a world that feels a lot less predictable than it did a year ago, I prefer the choices made by two other major dictionary companies.

First prize in my view goes to “identity,” the choice of Dictionary.com, a timely topic for the year that gave us Rachel Dolezal and Caitlin Jenner, among other challenges to our society’s conventional sense of selfhood and otherness.

Dolezal will be remembered as the Spokane, Washington, NAACP leader who passed for black, a complete reversal of the usual American tradition. This upset white conservatives who didn’t like the NAACP anyway. It also upset black traditionalists who felt Dolezal hadn’t paid enough dues to pose as an authentic African-American.

This conundrum proved to be remarkably similar to the dustup kicked up by Caitlin Jenner’s decision to emerge from the body of Olympic medalist Bruce Jenner. A few prominent radical feminists resented what they saw as Jenner’s EZ-pass around decades of struggle against institutional sexism.

Episodes like that, Dictionary.com CEO Liz McMillan said in a news release, sent enough people running to online dictionaries and other media to make identity “the clear frontrunner.”

“Our data indicated a growing interest in words related to identity,” McMillan said in the release, “as people encountered new terms throughout the year based on events tied to gender, sexuality, race, and other key issues.”

In a similar vein, Merriam-Webster.com named a suffix to be their Word of the Year: “-ism.” The website’s word watchers began to notice a surge in lookups that ended in those three letters. Of the thousands of queries seven with noticeably political themes rose to the top: socialism, fascism, racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism.

This was a year in which Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate and self-described democratic socialist, opened up a national dialogue of how socialism really works as something more than the epithet that conservatives like to fling at President Barack Obama. As Sanders’ crowds surged in mid-summer, so did lookups for “socialism” online.

Similarly billionaire showman Donald Trump’s calls for mass deportation of immigrants and praise for Vladimir Putin, among other comments, sent many rushing to their keyboards to look up “fascism.”

And racism, feminism, communism, capitalism and terrorism — among other popular “isms” — have been so bent out of shape by partisan and ideological accusations and counter-accusations that you need a dictionary just to keep score.

It is too early to say how much of an impact all of this chatter about identity and “-isms” will have on the 2016 presidential campaigns. We have elections to decide questions like that.

But as money, ideology and celebrity increasingly replace political parties as the pilots of national election campaigns, I am encouraged to hear that at least some people care about the words our political leaders use. I wish more of our political leaders did.

(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.) (c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Photo: “Socialim! At least fascists can spell.” (Sarah Joy via Flickr)

A Fresh Voice For An Impatient Generation

A Fresh Voice For An Impatient Generation

Congratulations to Ta-Nehisi Coates. His meditation on race in America has hit No. 1 in its first week on the New York Times‘ bestseller list. Race relations may still be a mess, as his book suggests, but at least people are interested in reading about it.

Good timing helps. In the age of smartphone cameras, police dashcams, and Twitter activism, the nation is abuzz with talk of minor encounters between police and black Americans that suddenly escalated into fatalities. Locations are as varied as Staten Island, New York; North Charleston, South Carolina; Waller County, Texas, and most recently, Cincinnati.

In those places, video has validated much of what black communities have been complaining about for decades. Video has become what Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown University Law School and a former prosecutor, has called “the C-SPAN of the streets.”

Amid this heightened conversation, Coates, a national editor at TheAtlantic, offers a brief but elegantly provocative 152-page book, Between the World and Me. It could just as easily been titled The Talk. That’s what many of us black parents call the chat that we have with our children about how to behave on the streets — between the perils of armed gangbangers on one side and touchy police officers on the other.

Coates offers his searing reflections on race in the form of an open letter to his 14-year-old son, Samori. His approach, inspired by James Baldwin’s 1963 classic, The Fire Next Time, and titled with a line from a Richard Wright poem, puts us inside the world of black parents and their children trying to navigate the world that, as Coates describes it, poses pervasive threats to the black body.

He describes the fear he felt growing up. Police, he cautions his son, “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” and commit “friskings, detainings, beatings, and humiliations.”

Street gangs — “young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage” — might also break your body or “shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies.”

The “need to be always on guard” can be exhausting, Coates writes, but death might “billow up like fog” on any ordinary afternoon.

I’ve been a fan of Coates’ work for years as a fresh voice in social commentary and he offers many valuable observations here. Yet I also was disappointed by the pervasive sense of pessimism in regard to America’s ability to redeem itself from past sins and provide opportunities for more progress — if we all work at it.

I heard in his impatience the voice of my own son, who tends to be far more eager to gripe about how far we have to go as a nation than to express appreciation for how far we have come. That’s OK, I have reasoned. It is the job of each new generation to express impatience with the present. It is up to us older folks who remember how bad things were in the days of Jim Crow segregation, for example, to tell the youngsters not to abandon hope.

To test my theory, I called Coates’ father, W. Paul Coates, a former Black Panther in Baltimore who now is founder and director of Black Classics Press. He was predictably proud of his son’s success with a book that was not expected to make him rich but mainly to “let what was inside of him out.”

But, unlike me, the elder Coates refused to acknowledge any daylight at all between his son’s outlook and his own. We may have moments of progress, including the election of an African-American president, Coates said he told his son, but “we must continue to struggle,” he said.

“Much of what he’s writing sounds like what I told him,” he said, “only less eloquently and with a lot more repetition. I don’t believe the arc of justice bends our way. I think we have to go out and bend it our way.”

With that, the father raises a good point. His son offers an eloquent diagnosis of what ails us about race and racism these days. But it mostly leaves prescriptions for the rest of us to find and to fill.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

Photo: Ta-Nehisi Coates speaking, January 21, 2015 (Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan via Flickr)