Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a former House Speaker whom presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is reportedly vetting for vice president, said Friday that black people in the U.S.
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Lewis’ post ended with an expression of hope that videos of police encounters like the two that surfaced this week would cause “naive, white Americans” to start seeing the issue of police violence against blacks with less cloudy eyes.
Gingrich added that white parents do not have to teach their children how to interact with police the way black parents do, the Republican said.
“My argument is the policies that have driven us apart, the policies that have trapped African-Americans in all too large numbers in poverty and in hopelessness [are] the ideological policies that say, ‘black lives matter, ‘” Gingrich said. “It’s both more unsafe because of crime – which is the Chicago story – but it is more risky that it’s substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don’t respect you and where you could easily get killed”.
“I think sometimes for whites, it’s hard to appreciate how real that is and how it’s an every day danger”, Gingrich said.
“When you’re one country and you’re one people, you cry at every funeral”, Jones said.
“We’ve come a fair distance – we have a black mayor of Atlanta, and have had a series of them”, added Gingrich, who spent his high school years in a segregated part of Georgia. “What we need is to have a conversation about mutual experiences”.
Newt Gingrich says that he thinks Donald Trump is a “necessary candidate” amid global anti-establishment sentiment, but that he wouldn’t automatically say yes to an eventual proposal to become Trump’s.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. “Their policing techniques, led by Chief Bratton, who invented them, actually have saved thousands of lives by focusing on crime in a very intelligent way”.
Gingrich also said that President Obama has hurt policing efforts with his “divisive” comments on race in criminal justice.
For most African Americans, whether policing practices are racist is not a question.
Gingrich and Jones used the Facebook Live to discuss the recent news of the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the shooting of several police officers by at least one sniper shooter in Dallas, Texas.
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“Well, baloney! All American lives matter, of all backgrounds”, he continued. “Hillary Clinton is a nightmare”, he said.
