A day after he defended a Donald Trump tweet many regarded as blatantly anti-Semitic, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich became an unlikely voice against bigotry.
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. During it, the man some regard as the frontrunner to become Trump’s VP choice acknowledged “it’s more dangerous to be black in America,” adding that “it’s more dangerous in that you’re substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don’t respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it’s difficult to appreciate how real that is.”
“It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this,” Gingrich said. “If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk.”
Here’s a clip — the whole Facebook Live broadcast can be seen here:
Newt Gingrich: "It is more dangerous to be black in America…(in situations with cops) you could easily get killed" pic.twitter.com/Lv0qy4WR6d
— The Daily Edge (@TheDailyEdge) July 8, 2016
Gingrich is speaking the truth — black people are more likely to be killed by cops than whites, and oftentimes this reality is frustratingly difficult for white people to grasp. But considering Gingrich’s history, it’s hard to believe he’s suddenly sincere about addressing structural racism.
In 2010, Gingrich accused President Obama of engaging in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” Those comments came a year after he called then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a “racist” for her comments about how being “a wise Latina woman” might help her come to better legal conclusions. Two years before that, Gingrich claimed that bilingual education teaches “the language of living in a ghetto.” Perhaps most infamously, when he was House Speaker, Gingrich proposed that the federal government should take children born out of wedlock to women under 18 and put them in orphanages.
One need not travel so far back in time for examples of Gingrich’s racial insensitivity. Just hours before his Friday Facebook Live broadcast, Gingrich appeared on Fox & Friends and said, “My argument is the policies that have driven us apart, the policies that have trapped African-Americans in all too large numbers in poverty and in hopelessness [are] the ideological policies that say, ‘Black lives matter.’
“Well, baloney! All American lives matter, of all backgrounds,” he continued. “And we ought to challenge the Hillary Clintons and the Bernie Sanderses to say that American lives matter. All American lives.”
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Gingrich, like Trump, has advocated for profiling as a counterterrorism strategy. He also dog whistled about black-on-black crime during Friday’s Facebook Live broadcast, saying that part of the reason it’s more dangerous to be black is “because of the crime, which is the Chicago story.” And of course, Gingrich has linked himself closely to Trump, who has spent his campaign fomenting many varieties of racial animus.