Political commentator Angela Rye said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the systemic racism of American policing has caused black people to “carry trauma in our bodies.”
Anchor George Stephanopoulos said, “Angela, it does seem like this issue I talked about with both Congresswoman Bass and Senator Scott. This issue of how much to shield police from lawsuits, what the standard should be for prosecution, that that is going to be what determines whether we get a compromise or not.”
Rye said, “It does. And I think what we have to look at is this verdict this week. With Derek Chauvin, this wasn’t his first incident. It wasn’t even his fifth. We like to talk about bad apples a lot, but the issue is that the way the system of policing is currently set up. It doesn’t punish bad systems or bad apples. Derek Chauvin, before George Floyd’s nine minutes and 29 seconds, knelt on the back of a 14-year-old black boy for 17 minutes in 2017. In North Carolina, just this week, you have Andrew Brown, the father of seven children, Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio. You have Miles Jackson in Columbus, Ohio, who was shot in an emergency room. Andrew Hill dropping off Christmas presents, right? The Columbus Police Department isn’t about one bad apple. It’s about an entire department. So we have to talk about qualified immunity without fighting with buzzwords, but really talking about how we solve for a system that, by design from its inception, was designed to capture and return and enslave people back to their masters. If we can’t uproot what was intended, we will forever have this problem, and we have to be willing to have honest discourse.”
She continued, “Well, we’re talking about, for example, with the Columbus Police Department, 30 black people killed in the last five years. Systemic racism isn’t something that you get to cherry-pick and decide when you want to apply it. It means the system at its core is rotten. It means that it has to be re-imagined and revisited, as Karen Bass talked about earlier in the show, who also is a champion and a hero on this issue of having the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House twice.”
She added, “What is incumbent upon, I think especially people who are perpetrators of said system, is to understand that it’s not just my experience. It’s not just me being emotional. There is literally trauma that I carry in my body. I encourage you all to read a book called “My Grandmother’s Hands” by Resmaa Menakem, who talks about how we carry trauma in our bodies. White body supremacy, black body trauma, and police body trauma. It is not fair for us to allow for a police officer to shoot and kill because they have an irrational fear of a black person or a person of color. That’s something that has to be addressed at the systemic level.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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