Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020, in Kenosha, Wis.
Presidential candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump both traveled to Kenosha last week, but only Biden addressed the horrific, violent crime that had drawn national attention to the city. Trump just wanted to pour more gasoline on the fire. The inexcusable crime was an all-too-familiar one in our country—another shooting of a black American Jacob Blake by a white police officer, this time by pumping seven bullets point-blank into Blake’s back while his three children, 3, 5 and 8, watched screaming and crying in the backseat of his SUV.
Former Vice President Biden did what presidents are supposed to do after heart-wrenching national tragedies. He offered words of hope an overwhelming majority of Americans now support ending decades of routine, life-threatening tactics by police against black and brown Americans that would never be tolerated in white communities. “We’re finally now getting to the point where we’re going to address the original sin in this country. . . slavery and all the vestiges of it,” Biden said. “I can’t guarantee you everything gets solved in four years. But I can guarantee you one thing. It will be a whole heck of a lot better. We’ll move further down the road.”
Trump wasn’t interested in reducing Kenosha’s racial tensions, only in exploiting them. Trump’s entire political career has been based on dividing Americans and inflaming racism. Kenosha was a golden opportunity to inflame racial violence in a key state expected to play a major role in November’s election.
Trump didn’t even mention Blake’s name in Kenosha. He cruelly minimized the life-shattering police shots that left Blake paralyzed from the waist down, comparing them to an embarrassing flub by a champion golfer missing a three-foot putt. In answer to a reporter’s question, Trump said he didn’t consider systemic racism a problem in American policing. “I think you do have some bad apples,” Trump said. “I think you’d agree every once in a while you’ll see something. They call it ‘choking’ and it happens.”
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Choking on His Words
Trump tastelessly used “choking” to excuse deadly police practices at a time when cellphone cameras have allowed all of us to witness African Americans repeatedly dying from police choke holds and in one horrific video a police officer pressing his knee on the neck of George Floyd for nearly nine minutes. No one should ever agree it’s acceptable for unarmed black or brown Americans to die at the hands of the police “every once in a while.”
Trump claimed his purpose in Kenosha was supporting the police and standing up for “LAW & ORDER!” as he shouts on Twitter. But in America today, those goals can be contradictory. Shooting a citizen repeatedly in the back does not uphold law and order. Police do not make a community safer by welcoming armed white vigilantes into their cities to threaten public demonstrations calling for racial equality in policing.
Shortly before Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Trump supporter with an assault rifle, killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded a third, a Kenosha police officer handed him a bottle of water and thanked him for coming. Police failed to arrest Rittenhouse after the shootings. He was arrested at home in Antioch, Ill., the next day and charged with five felonies, including two counts of murder.
Meeting with Family
Biden met for more than an hour with Blake’s family and talked with Jacob by telephone after he left the ICU. Biden said he admired the entire family’s “overwhelming sense of resilience and optimism” about community support they’d received despite also receiving racist death threats. Trump wasn’t interested in meeting with the family and the feeling was mutual. “All we ask is that he keep his disrespect, his foul language far away from our family,” said Justin Blake, Jacob’s uncle. “We need a president that’s going to unite and take us in a different direction.”
To help reduce the racial divisions Trump did his best to exacerbate in Kenosha, Biden hosted a community meeting at Grace Lutheran Church bringing together diverse perspectives—a firefighter describing his department’s exhaustion from battling fires, a small business owner devastated by her looted store, a black father worried about his young son getting caught up in a racially biased criminal justice system. Porsche Bennett, an organizer for Black Lives Activists Kenosha, was applauded when she summed up:
“I’ve seen enough ... Hold these officers accountable to the same crimes we get held accountable to. If I was that officer (who shot Blake) I would be in Kenosha county jail right now. We want the same exact rights as others. We want to be treated like everybody else.”
She didn’t sound like a radical terrorist at all. She was just an ordinary American who wanted what white Americans have always taken for granted in our democracy without even thinking about it.
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