What To Do When You're Stopped By Police - The ACLU & Elon James White
Know Anyone Who Thinks Racial Profiling Is Exaggerated? Watch This, And Tell Me When Your Jaw Drops.
Tuesday, April 13, 2021
Monday, April 12, 2021
Police killings of black people: the legacy of lynching writ large | COMMENTARY - Baltimore Sun
Police killings of black people: the legacy of lynching writ large | COMMENTARY
Demonstrators walk through Fells Point in protest of the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. (Kevin Richardson / Baltimore Sun)
"As if any further proof were needed, the recent killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd reveal the thinly veiled truth about how little black lives are valued in this country. That all three killings involved current or former law enforcement officers is revealing.
The license that is taken, the tolerance that is assumed by the perpetrators in these (and too many other) incidents is an inheritance. It is the legacy of lynching writ large: horrifying, traumatizing, breathtaking — and present.
One is tempted to think of these crimes as vestiges of the centuries-long campaign of racial terror that was waged against black Americans. But the term “vestige” implies something that is outdated, a relic, something from the past. These incidents remind us there is nothing outdated about racism. These murders are not outliers.
The Maryland Lynching Truth and Reconciliation Commission recently established this working definition for what constitutes a racial terror lynching: “the unlawful killing of an African American by white mob violence, often with the apparent complicity of state and local officials, intended to incite racial terror and subservience to white supremacy.”
Using that standard, the Floyd murder was not LIKE a lynching, it IS a lynching. Only in this case the “white mob” happened to be police officers. The very people entrusted with the responsibility of protecting his life, took his life — in broad daylight and in public. This is terror, and it screams to be recognized as such.
The pathetic spectacle of a white woman calling police to falsely report that she and her dog were being threatened by an African American man in Central Park is another side of the same racist coin. The woman’s overt threat to the man, “I’m going to call the cops and tell them that an African American man is threatening me” (emphasis mine), invokes a timeless trope used to incite the lynchings of hundreds, if not thousands, of black men in this country. It’s an example of what New York Times columnist Charles Blow called “white women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their white femininity to activate systems of white terror against black men.”
It is a phenomenon all too familiar in Maryland. In 1885, a white mob dragged a 15-year old boy from the old Baltimore County jail in Towson and lynched him to short-circuit a planned appeal to the Supreme Court. One member of the lynch mob explained to The Sun, “Every man was actuated by the thought that … he was protecting his own wife, sweetheart or children.”
So the fuse that the Central Park dog walker threatened to light is short but centuries old. The reservoir of hysteria the dog walker drew from, “an African American man is threatening me” could have led to far more tragic consequences. The accused man was guilty only of birding while black.
It’s hard not to see some irony in the Central Park episode. In 1989, real estate developer Donald Trump embellished his reputation by taking out full-page ads in New York newspapers calling for the death penalty to be imposed in the case of the so-called Central Park Five. Never mind that the teenagers hadn’t yet even been tried.
Even after DNA evidence totally exonerated the young men and their convictions were vacated, the now President Donald Trump refused to accept their innocence or apologize. Is it surprising then, that in 2017, the first year of the Trump presidency, hate crimes in the U.S. increased by 17% compared to the previous year (as reported by the FBI Universal Crime report)? Perhaps more telling is a 2019 analysis by The Washington Post that revealed that counties where Trump held rallies in 2016 saw hate crimes increase by 226% in the following year.
The flagrant disregard for black lives is a tragic, but undeniable, symptom of the pervasive racism that poisons our institutions, weakens our community and demeans civility itself. Is this not terror? Before you answer, try to imagine what our black children must be thinking when they go to bed tonight.
We take as an article of faith that “truth and reconciliation are sequential”; that is, we need to acknowledge the truth before racial reconciliation is even possible. The mission of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project is to encourage Marylanders to acknowledge the truth about the history of racial terror in our state. At the same time, we must also acknowledge the truth that racial terror is not just historical.
Will Schwarz (wschwarz@mdlynchingmemorial.org) is president of the Maryland Lynching Memorial Project."
Protesters Clash With Police After Minnesota Officer Shoots Black Man
Protesters Clash With Police After Minnesota Officer Shoots Black Man
“A man died after an officer shot him during a traffic stop in Brooklyn Center, near where Derek Chauvin is on trial in the death of George Floyd.
BROOKLYN CENTER, Minn. — A 20-year-old Black man died after a police officer shot him during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb on Sunday, sending hundreds of people into the streets where they clashed with police officers into Monday morning.
The protests in Brooklyn Center came hours before the 11th day of the trial of Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who has been charged with murdering George Floyd, was set to begin in a courtroom less than 10 miles away.
Outside of the Brooklyn Center Police Department on Sunday night, smoke billowed into the air as a line of police officers fired rubber bullets and chemical agents at protesters, some of whom lobbed rocks, bags of garbage and water bottles at the police. Brooklyn Center’s mayor ordered a curfew until 6 a.m., and the local school superintendent said the district would move to remote learning on Monday “out of an abundance of caution.”
A woman who said she was the victim’s mother identified him as Daunte Wright, 20.
The shooting injected more frustration and anxiety into the Twin Cities region, where Mr. Floyd’s death and the destructive protests that followed are fresh on residents’ minds as they await a verdict in the Chauvin trial.
Chief Tim Gannon of the Brooklyn Center Police Department said an officer had shot the man on Sunday afternoon after pulling his car over for a traffic violation and discovering that the driver had a warrant out for his arrest. As the police tried to detain the man, he stepped back into his car, at which point an officer shot him, Chief Gannon said.
The man’s car then traveled for several blocks and struck another vehicle, after which the police and medical workers pronounced him dead. Chief Gannon did not give any information on the officer who fired or say how severe the crash had been, though the passengers in the other car were not injured. The chief said he believed that officers’ body cameras had been turned on during the shooting.
Katie Wright, the woman who said she was Mr. Wright’s mother, told reporters that her son had been driving a car that his family had just given him two weeks ago and that he had called her as he was being pulled over.
“He said they pulled him over because he had air fresheners hanging from his rearview mirror,” she said. Ms. Wright added that her son had been driving with his girlfriend when he was shot. The police said a woman in the car had been hurt in the crash but that her injuries were not life-threatening.
John Harrington, the commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, said the unrest that followed Mr. Wright’s death had spread to a mall in Brooklyn Center and that people had broken into about 20 businesses there. By about midnight, most of the protesters had fled from around the police department, once National Guard troops and Minnesota State Patrol officers arrived to back up the police officers who stood around the building with riot gear and batons.
Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, wrote on Twitter that he was praying for Mr. Wright’s family “as our state mourns another life of a Black man taken by law enforcement.”
Chief Gannon said he had asked the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, the agency that led the inquiry into Mr. Floyd’s death, to investigate the shooting.
The shooting comes after two weeks of testimony in the trial of Mr. Chauvin, who is white, that has laid bare the pain that the death of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, caused in Minneapolis. Jurors have heard from people who witnessed Mr. Floyd’s arrest, medical experts who described his death and police officials — including the Minneapolis police chief — who condemned Mr. Chauvin’s actions. And the graphic video of Mr. Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd for more than nine minutes has been played repeatedly. Witness testimony is expected to resume at about 9:15 a.m. on Monday.
Many businesses in Minneapolis have kept boards over their windows since shortly after Mr. Floyd’s death on May 25, when protests rocked the city for days and scores of businesses were burned. And Black residents in and around Minneapolis remain on edge over policing, said Wynfred Russell, a City Council member in Brooklyn Park, another suburb where some businesses were broken into on Sunday after the shooting.
“You do have a lot of raw nerves here,” he said.
Ms. Wright, the victim’s mother, said that when her son had called her during the traffic stop, she had urged him to give his phone to a police officer so she could give the insurance information.
“Then I heard the police officer come to the window and say, ‘Put the phone down and get out of the car,’” she said.
She said she her son had dropped the phone or put it down, after which she heard “scuffling” and an officer telling Mr. Wright not to run. Then, she said, someone hung up the phone. When she called back, her son’s girlfriend answered and told her that he had been shot.
At an earlier protest and vigil near the scene of Mr. Wright’s death, his mother had urged the protesters to be peaceful.
“We want justice for Daunte,” she said. “We don’t want it to be about all this violence.”
But hours later, outside of the Brooklyn Center Police Department, protesters chanted and threw things at police officers, inching closer to the building until they were pushed back when police officers fired projectiles that burst with a loud bang and gas that burned their throats and eyes. The gas reached several apartment buildings across the street where families said they were shaken by the conflict that erupted in their front yards.
“We had to shut the doors because it was all in my house,” Tasha Nethercutt, a woman who lives in one of the apartments, said of the gas fired by the police. She said there were four children in her apartment during the unrest, including a two-year-old.
Kimberly Lovett, who until recently had been a property manager for the four apartment buildings near the police station, said she had driven to the area to check on her former tenants and to show her frustration with the police.
“There are kids in all of these buildings,” she said, pointing toward apartment balconies, some of which had children’s toys scattered on them. “What we’re fed up with is the police steady killing young Black men.”
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs reported from Brooklyn Center, Minn., and Azi Paybarah from New York. Matt Furber contributed reporting from Brooklyn Center, and Neil Vigdor from Greenwich, Conn.“
Democratic Values Are Still Under Attack — Even Without Trump In The White House
Democratic Values Are Still Under Attack — Even Without Trump In The White House
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Dustin Chambers / REUTERS
“During the Trump presidency, many worried about the administration’s violation of long-standing norms. And former President Trump certainly did break with a number of enduring traditions, to the extent that his utter disregard for his office almost ceased to shock.
But here at FiveThirtyEight, we have argued that Trump’s flouting of norms didn’t matter nearly as much as the underlying democratic values his administration threatened — from disrespecting the vital role that opposition can play in a democracy to trying to use the military and police for political gain. And, of course, there was the fact that Trump pretty much refused to peacefully concede the election. (He technically did concede, but not until after a violent mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol.)
Trump’s presidency highlighted the power that the office, by attacking (or neglecting) democratic values, has to damage democracy. But just because Trump is out of office doesn’t mean some values aren’t still under threat. Yes, President Biden does seem more inclined to follow both the formal and informal rules of the presidency, but a powerful executive branch remains a concern. So here is a look at some of the key democratic values that are still under attack. Some reflect the lingering effects of Trumpism; others are rooted in systemic problems that began well before the Trump years.
Growing economic inequality challenges who has a voice in politics
The United States has high levels of income inequality compared with other wealthy industrialized nations, and this inequality has been growing over time. This trend raises the question of how economic inequality affects our politics — specifically, core democratic values like representation and participation in the political process.
This is a weighty topic, and there are areas where scholars don’t agree. For example, experts are split on whether political decisions reflect the preferencesof high-income Americans more than others. But overall, there is some consensus among experts that economic disparities pose a threat to core democratic values like equality for all and political participation. And some studies even find that economic inequality makes some citizens less likely to engage in politics, including turning out to vote.
In their new book “The Economic Other,” political scientists Meghan Condon and Amber Wichowsky (a colleague of mine at Marquette University) find that when people compare themselves to those who have greater wealth, they report feeling less confident in their ability to make demands of government — even though those comparisons often make them more likely to want government action. This illustrates how high levels of inequality can dampen political engagement and participation.
As with so many things in American politics, economic disparities are also tied up in racial ones. For example, Brookings Institution researcher Vanessa Williamson noted in her examination of the racial wealth gap in the U.S. that the median white household has a net worth 10 times that of the median Black household. The significant gaps we see often reflect many years of policy decisions that have prevented equal opportunity for all.
Of course, the problem that economic inequality poses for American democracy predates the Trump administration. And despite the criticism the administration’s 2017 tax bill drew for its focus on the richest Americans, reports are actually somewhat mixed on whether economic inequality got worse (or better) during the first three years of the Trump administration. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, made that debate moot, both underscoring America’s longstanding inequities while also making them worse.
Economic inequality is a long-term and systemic problem. It was also an important issue in the 2020 nomination contest and election, and Biden has pledged to tackle it. What are his prospects for success? On the one hand, the administration’s COVID-19 relief bill is expected to bring temporary relief for low-income Americans, and the economy is largely predicted to rebound this year. The Biden administration is also talking about taxing America’s richest citizens and companies to fund government projects. On the other hand, though, Democrats were unable to agree on a proposal to raise the minimum wage. How to address income inequality has long been a source of division for the party, so finding solutions to the deeper and more systemic problems like racial disparitiesor low wages in some sectors is likely to prove politically challenging.
Distrust in institutions is high; there’s also a question of which institutions to trust
Declining levels of trust in American political institutions is another long-term concern in American politics, and it’s one that certainly got a lot of attention under Trump.
It’s no secret that institutions like Congress generally receive low ratings from the public. It’s not clear, though, that overall levels of trust in government declined while Trump was in office — they were already pretty low.
While the topic is complicated, there’s a general sense among experts that our democracy is in a perilous position when people don’t trust governing institutions — or each other. As political scientists Marc Hetherington and Thomas Rudolph explained in their 2015 book, “Why Washington Won’t Work,” trust is necessary for building coalitions to support government policy.
Today, there are clear partisan differences on the topic, with Republicans reporting far more distrust of other branches of government and other institutions, like the media and colleges and universities, with some even linking this distrust to growing support for anti-democratic movements and ideas.
But the last few years in American politics aren’t just about institutional distrust. They were also about what institutions are worthy of trust. For instance, high-profile instances of police brutality have made many Americans question whether institutions of criminal justice, like the police, should be trusted. Progressive activists have also questioned the legitimacy of current immigration enforcement, with calls to “abolish” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, challenging the policy-makers who established these institutions. As such, there is also a more fundamental question underlying questions of institutional distrust — that is, which institutions are deserving of support and trust in the first place.
It’s easy to focus on the politics of distrust — hardcore Republicans and left-leaning activists are often mistrustful of institutions, but institutional distrust also extends beyond ideology. Younger Americans, low-income Americans and those who aren’t white also have lower levels of personal trust, according to the Pew Research Center. Other academic research also suggests that poor and nonwhite Americans are more likely to have negative experiences with the government, such as policing and carceral contact (probation, parole, and jail or prison), paying fines, or punitive processes to obtain social services.
In other words, it’s not just that Americans distrust institutions, or that this trust has become polarized. There are also worthwhile questions about whether these institutions broadly reflect core democratic values like equality and human dignity.
Voting and election administration are increasingly politicized
With Georgia’s new voting law and the passage of Democrats’ sweeping voting reform bill in the House of Representatives, voting rights have been at the center of both parties’ national agenda. On the one hand, this isn’t a new debate. Americans have long argued over whether rules like requiring photo identification at the polls are discriminatory or would depress voter turnout.
But given how intense the debate around expanding access to mail ballots and absentee voting was leading up to the 2020 presidential election, the conversation around who gets to vote and how elections are conducted has become far more political — especially considering the role Trump played in baselessly dismissing these methods as fraudulent and sowing doubt about the integrity of the election results. (It’s something that’s had real repercussions, too: Six in 10 Republicans still say the election “was stolen” from Trump “due to widespread voter fraud,” according to a recent Reuters poll.)
It’s no coincidence then that the states where we’ve seen the biggest pushes for legislation restricting voting are also the ones that were the most closely contested in 2020, as FiveThirtyEight found in a recent analysis of over 300 bills considered in state legislatures this year. Many of these laws, if passed, would likely also disproportionately affect poorer voters and voters of color.
But it’s not just changes to the voting process at stake; there are also changes in how elections are administered, which risk making them more nakedly partisan affairs. Take the provision in the Georgia law that allows the state elections board to remove local election officials. Given that these state officials are appointed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, there is a risk that there could be more partisan input in the certification of election results — something that Trump actively sought in his efforts to overturn the election result in Georgia.
The fight over voting laws reflects some of the same problems outlined earlier — inequality along racial and economic lines, the widening ideological gulf between the two parties, and a set of governing institutions that lack public trust and perhaps are not always worthy of public trust — but it also underscores how one of our most fundamental democratic values, the right to vote, is now in jeopardy, especially given that one party is increasingly pushing anti-democratic measures.
Threats to democratic values — and failure to live up to democratic ideals — have a long history in America. And in many ways, these systemic challengesdefy the influence of any one leader or administration. But there is evidence that Trumpism and its challenges to democratic values are lingering in the political system. We see this in the persistence of rhetoric that delegitimizes the opposition and voices racist views, and in the decline of bipartisan cooperationin the face of deeper governing divides.
Presidents can’t single-handedly address the problems with our democracy. But they can work to set the political tone and empower forces that safeguard, rather than undermine, democratic values.“
Sunday, April 11, 2021
Opinion | Tucker Carlson and White Replacement - The New York Times
Tucker Carlson and White Replacement
"This racist theory is rooted in white supremacist panic.
On Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson caused an uproar by promoting the racist, anti-Semitic, patriarchal and conspiratorial “white replacement theory.” Also known as the “great replacement theory,” it stands on the premise that nonwhite immigrants are being imported (sometimes the Jewish community is accused of orchestrating this) to replace white people and white voters. The theory is also an inherent chastisement of white women for having a lower birthrate than nonwhite women.
“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters, from the third world. But, they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Carlson continued, “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
The whole statement is problematic. First, what is the third world? This label originated as a way to categorize countries that didn’t align with Western countries or the former Soviet bloc. It’s now often used to describe poor countries, or developing countries, and by extension, mostly nonwhite majority countries.
When Carlson worries about immigrants from the third world, he is talking about Hispanic, Asian and Black people who he worries will outnumber “current” voters. Current voters, in this formulation, are the white people who make up the majority of the American electorate.
Second, and revealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.
But although white replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, the fact that the percentage of voters who are white in America is shrinking as a percentage of all voters is not. Neither is the fact that white supremacists are panicked about this.
White supremacists in this country have long worried about being replaced by people, specifically voters, who are not white. In the post-Civil War era, before the current immigrant wave from predominantly nonwhite countries, most of that anxiety in America centered on Black people.
Judge Solomon Calhoon of Mississippi wrote in 1890 of the two decades of Black suffrage following the Civil War, “Negro suffrage is an evil.”
Calhoon worried that white voters had been replaced, or outnumbered, by Black ones, writing: “Shall the ballot remain as now adjusted, the whole country in the meantime taking the chances of the rapid increase of the blacks, and leaving, in the meantime, the whites as they now are in those localities where they are outnumbered?”
Calhoon would go on to become the president of the state’s constitutional convention that year, a convention called with the explicit intention of codifying white supremacy and suppressing the Black vote. States across the South would follow the Mississippi example, calling constitutional conventions of their own, until Jim Crow was the law of the South.
The combination of Jim Crow voter suppression laws and the migration of millions of Black people out of the South during the Great Migration diluted the Black vote, distributing it across more states, and virtually guaranteed that white voters would not be outnumbered by Black ones in any state. The fear of “Black domination” dissipated.
Indeed, as extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was being debated in 1969, The New York Times made note of the fact that Attorney General John Mitchell, a proponent of a competing bill, was well aware that even if all the unregistered Black people in the South were registered, their voting power still couldn’t overcome the “present white conservative tide” in the South. As The Times added, “In fact, Mr. Mitchell is known to believe that Negro registration benefits the Republicans because it drives the Southern whites out of the Democratic Party.”
A reporter at the time asked an aide of a Republican representative, “What has happened to the party of Lincoln?” The aide responded, “It has put on a Confederate uniform.”
But now, in addition to Black voters voting overwhelmingly Democratic, there is a wave of nonwhite immigrants who also lean Democratic. And tremendous energy is being exerted not only by white supremacists in the general population, but also Republican office holders, to attack immigrants, curtail immigration, disenfranchise Black and brown voters and assail abortion rights.
One of the surest ways of preventing a Black person from voting is to prevent them from living. As The Times reported in 1970, Leander Perez, a man who had been a judge and prosecutor and “led the last stand against integration” in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, once famously linked Black birth control to racial dominance, stating: “The best way to hate a [expletive] is to hate him before he’s born.”
I would even argue that the bizarre obsession with trans people is also rooted in part in white anxiety over reproduction.
The architects of whiteness in America drew the definition so narrowly that it rendered it fragile, unsustainable, and in constant need of defense. Replacement of the white majority in this country by a more multiracial, multicultural majority is inevitable. So is white supremacist panic over it."
How Cuba Beat the Pandemic: From Developing New Vaccines to Sending Doctors Overseas to Help Others | Democracy Now!
Clyburn offers Manchin history lesson to clear Senate path for Biden reforms | US voting rights | The Guardian
Clyburn offers Manchin history lesson to clear Senate path for Biden reforms
"Jim Clyburn, the House majority whip, said on Sunday he intends to give Joe Manchin a lesson in US history as he attempts to clear a path for Joe Biden on voting rights and infrastructure.
Manchin, a moderate Democratic senator from West Virginia, has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s ambitious proposals by insisting he will not vote to reform or end the Senate filibuster, which demands a super-majority for legislation to pass, to allow key measures passage through the 50-50 chamber on a simple majority basis.
His stance has drawn praise from Republicans: Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, hailed Manchin as the politician “almost singlehandedly preserving the Senate”.
But Democrats appear to be losing patience – and none more vociferously than Clyburn.
“I’m going to remind the senator exactly why the Senate came into being,” Clyburn, from South Carolina, told CNN’s State of the Union, refreshing criticism of Manchin that has included saying he feels “insulted” by his refusal to fully embrace voting rights reform.
“The Senate was not always an elective office. The moment we changed and made it an elective office [was because] the people thought a change needed to be made.
“The same thing goes for the filibuster. The filibuster was put in place to extend debate and give time to bring people around to a point of view. The filibuster was never put in place to suppress voters … It was there to make sure that minorities in this country have constitutional rights and not be denied.”
Clyburn has assailed Manchin for promoting a bipartisan approach to voting rights and refusing to endorse the For the People Act, a measure passed by the US House and intended to counter restrictive voting laws targeting minorities proposed by Republicans in 47 states and passed in Georgia last month.
“You’re going to say it’s more important for you to protect 50 Republicans in the Senate than for you to protect your fellow Democrat’s seat in Georgia? That’s a bunch of crap,” Clyburn told Huffpost this month, referring to Senator Raphael Warnock’s 2022 re-election battle that supporters feel has become much harder due to the new voting laws.
On Sunday Clyburn also reached into history to repeat his contention that the Georgia law is “the new Jim Crow”, a claim repeated by Biden but which Republicans say is unfair.
“When we first started determining who was eligible to vote and who was not,” Clyburn said, “they were property owners. They knew that people of colour, people coming out of slavery did not own property.
“…And then they went from that to having disqualifiers. And they picked those offences that were more apt to be committed by people of colour to disqualify voters.
“The whole history in the south of putting together those who are eligible to vote is based upon the practices and the experiences of people based upon their race. So, I would say to anybody, ‘Come on, just look at the history … and you will know that what is taking place today is a new Jim Crow. It’s just that simple.”
Despite the urging of Clyburn and others, Manchin remains steadfast in his belief bipartisanship is Biden’s best path to implementing his agenda. In a CNN interview last week, the senator said the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol “changed me”, and said he wanted to use his power as a swing vote in the 50-50 Senate “to make a difference” by working with Republicans and Democrats.
“Something told me, ‘Wait a minute. Pause. Hit the pause button.’ Something’s wrong. You can’t have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other,” he said, of watching a riot mounted by supporters of Donald Trump seeking to overturn his election defeat on the grounds it was caused by voter fraud – a lie without legal standing.
Manchin said he had a good relationship with the White House and wanted to meet Warnock and Georgia’s other Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, to discuss voting rights.
On Sunday, Clyburn said the riot also had “a tremendous effect” on him.
“When I saw that Capitol policeman complain about how many times he was called the N-word by those people, who were insurrectionists out there, when I see [the civil rights leader] John Lewis’s photo torn to pieces and scattered on the floor, that told me everything I need to know about those insurrectionists, and I will remind anybody who reflects on 6 January to think about these issues as well,” he said.
Clyburn was among the first major figures to endorse Biden last year, helping nurse him through bleak times after rejections in early primaries.
The congressman has Biden’s ear and in an interview with the Guardian in December promised to keep pressure on his friend to fulfill a promise in his victory speech directed to African Americans: “They always have my back, and I’ll have yours.”
“I think he will,” Clyburn said. “I’m certainly going to work hard to make sure that he remembers that he said it.”