In the wake of the deaths of two black men at the hands of law enforcement officers in Louisiana and Minnesota this week, Gingrich starred in a Facebook Live broadcast with Van Jones on Friday afternoon.
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“It took me a long time, and a lot of people talking to me, to understand that if you are a normal white American, the truth is that you don’t understand being black in America”, Gingrich said.
A recent Pew Research Center report found that black and white Americans views are largely worlds apart today.
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is reportedly in the mix to be Donald Trump’s running mate and he’s staking his claim for the VP spot with some Olympic-worthy backpedaling.
The Black Lives Matter movement, Gingrich said, should be seen as a “corrective” that “initially people reject because it’s not in their world”. But it is more risky in that you’re substantially more likely to end up in a situation where police don’t respect you where you could easily get killed. “Sometimes for whites it’s hard to appreciate how real that it is, that it’s an everyday danger”.
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. The statement left a sour taste in the mouths of many, and further fueled the speculation of Gingrich being a racist himself.
“If you’re a normal Caucasian”, Gingrich continued, “you don’t see that, because it’s not part of your experience”.
At a campaign rally last week in Cincinnati, Ohio, Trump was coy about what position Gingrich might hold in his administration, but signaled that the former speaker would have a role. And white America needs to realize that. While overseeing a fraud lawsuit, Trump said Curiel was “a member of a club or society very strongly pro-Mexican” and thus can’t be impartial to him because of his border comments.
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The former Georgia congressman also spoke about how many people don’t understand how unsafe it is to be a police officer today. “A president who could have worked in the African-Americans community to make people feel better about themselves”.
