The lone black Republican in the Senate, South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Wednesday spoke about his experience with law enforcement as a black man.
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“I have felt the anger, the frustration, the sadness and the humiliation that comes with feeling like you’re being targeted for nothing more than just being yourself”, Scott said in a powerful floor speech reflecting upon the killings of police and by police that have shaken the nation.
There is absolutely nothing more frustrating, more damaging to your soul, than when you know you’re following the rules and being treated like you are not.
In a series of three speeches this week, Scott used his own personal experiences to bridge a gap that seems to have widened over the last ten days, following the deaths of two black men at the hands of cops and then five Dallas officers at the hands of a sniper.
Mr. Scott described Wednesday’s speech as “the most hard because it is the most personal”. “Sure. But the vast majority of the time I was pulled over for driving a new vehicle in the wrong neighborhood or something else just as trivial”, said Scott, R-S.C. He noted that he had been stopped seven times in one year as an elected official. “You, I don’t, ‘ Scott recalled the officer saying with ‘a little attitude.’ Scott said the tone of the encounter suggested that the officer believed he was impersonating a senator”. The staffer eventually traded in his Chrysler for a “more obscure form of transportation” because “he was exhausted of being targeted”. “You, I don’t. Show me your ID'”. Being both a black man and the first black Republican senator since the Reconstruction era, his perspective is one that many assume would contradict itself.
“There’s never, ever an acceptable reason to harm a member of our law enforcement”, he said in his floor speech.
“He was 94 years old and meant so much to me”, Scott said. “I was driving a vehicle that had an improper headlight”, Scott said. “These are people, lost forever”.
Scott said solutions to improve trust between police officers and communities, particularly members of the black community, will require work from multiple sources.
He also talked of a time when a police officer suggested, without any cause, that his auto was stolen.
A Scott spokeswoman told FoxNews.com that the senator is scheduled to deliver a third speech later Thursday in which he will propose ways to “move forward”. “It will simply leave you blind and the American family very vulnerable”.
Scott represented South Carolina’s 1st District in the House from 2011 to 2013.
The only black Republican in the US Senate has revealed how he has been hassled by police and once had to prove to an officer he worked on Capitol Hill.
“This has been a tough week”. It’s an experience all too familiar to many of his African-American colleagues in Congress.
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Speaking on the floor after Scott on Thursday, Lankford explained that it was a simple matter of getting “everybody to have their feet under the same table”.
