CNN’s Henderson: ‘White Americans Have to Come to Terms’ with Their Racism

CNN senior political reporter Malika Henderson said Tuesday on “Inside Politics” that “white Americans have to come to terms with” their racism while reacting to President Joe Biden’s speech in Buffalo, NY, after the mass shooting in Tops supermarket.

Anchor John King asked, “The question is how do you sustain it in the sense that the president of the United States saying there’s a venom of hate in our politics. It cannot be the story of our time. How do you bend the arc?”

Henderson said, “You know, it has been the story of our time. It has been the story of America. The sort of twin cultures not only gun culture but also white supremacist culture as well. And gun culture, in some ways, being used to reinforce white supremacy, as we saw in this instance in Buffalo. And as we’ve seen in other instances, El Paso, in Pittsburgh, in Charleston as well, a few years ago. You know, Biden was talking about two Americas here. He talked about the ordinary African-Americans, many of whom came to Buffalo fleeing racial violence. You think about the ways in which the northern black towns came to existence. A lot of those folks were fleeing oppression in the south only to be met with oppression and racist violence in these northern cities. They were going about their daily lives at a grocery store. That is one America.”

She added, “And the other America, the kind of racism that has coursed through the country for decades and hasn’t been denounced enough, hasn’t been rooted out enough. You know, oftentimes, it is African-Americans who talk about racism. It is really a white cultural problem that white Americans have to come to terms with, why is it that African-Americans and brown and black people are more generally are seen as the other or demonized so easily in a lot of our politics. You know we sort of talk about white supremacy, but it’s also the ways in which people talk about folks coming across the border, the demonization of it goes around about those folks, that somehow they also are a threat to Americans.”

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