After the police-involved killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, bipartisan legislative efforts to work on much needed policing reforms, have hit a snag.
Despite nationwide momentum, voting 55-45, US. Senate Democrats blocked a Republican bill that would address some policing practices, including the use of force and racial discrimination by police.
Democrats who want stronger legislation said that the bill is insufficient to address policing, and criminal justice reforms. Failure to pass the bill prompts the question of why it takes so long for legislation to save black people’s lives.
South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham is among those asking the question. Although there is speculation that Graham’s interest is politically-motivated and not out of a concern for members of the black community, nonetheless, it’s a fair question.
Specifically, what inquiring black minds want to know is why America’s first black president, Barack Obama, didn’t eradicate the vestiges of racist policies aimed at black people.
As unfathomable as it seems when police officers killed Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and scores of other black people, it was during the Obama presidency.
Given the history of over-policing in black communities, optimism ran high that a black president, with a black attorney general, Eric Holder, would make a top-down overhaul of the criminal-justice system a priority.
It’s mind-boggling that when the Democrats held the highest office in the Nation from 2008 until 2016, that aside from a handful of investigations launched by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that no enactment of legislation to change police behavior materialized.
Neither the so-called “first black president,” Bill Clinton, nor Barack Obama, the first bona fide black president, were able to eliminate the menacing choke-holds, no-knock warrants, qualified immunity, and other forms of police brutality used against black people.
A closer look at the history of the Democratic Party’s entanglement, its perpetuation of systemic racism, complacency, and support of the prison industrial complex, suggests that the expectations to address the criminal justice reform was too high.
As much as president Obama may have wanted to implement change, it’s not that simple. It’s not easy to unravel, and walk away from the long history of the Democratic Party’s involvement in institutionalized racism.
Black lives didn’t only start to matter in 2020; they mattered in 2001 when some Democrats helped to propagate a ridiculous theory put forward by political scientist and criminologist John Dilulio Jr..
Dilulio, a George W. Bush appointee espoused that young black men, “super-predators” who grew up in an environment of wrongdoing and without family structure, would become ruthless criminals.
Then U.S. senator and later 2016 Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton played a role in advancing Dilulio’s racist premise. Senator Clinton went as far as to describe Dilulio’s super-predators as black children having “no conscience, no empathy.”
Clinton since has apologized for speaking about young Black children as though they were monstrous fiends. Her reckless comments likely increased agitation between the races and may have encouraged the rampant police brutality occurring in Black communities.
Yet, considering what president Clinton had done with the passage of his infamous, Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, senator Clinton’s support of the super-predator nonsense was in keeping with her husband’s mandate.
What the Bill Clinton Crime bill did was to disproportionately incarcerate thousands of minorities, as well as give a tremendous boost to the warehousing of young black men in a for-profit prison system. The law smacked of being racially- motivated by mandating life sentences for criminals convicted of a violent felony after two or more prior convictions, including drug crimes.
President Clinton has apologized and said, “I signed a bill that made the problem worse…. “And I want to admit it.”
Whether the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden can defend his party’s past cooperation with racist policies, or his very long legislative record on racial injustice, is yet to be seen.
Anthony Stanford is a freelance writer, and author of the book, Copping Out: The Consequences of Police Corruption and Misconduct.