Clyburn: Education, Health, Judicial Systems Designed to ‘Maintain Suppression of African-Americans’

Clyburn said, “I was very incensed over that. And you wonder sometimes when you’re dealing with an issue like this for two or three weeks, and then you see another police officer still being insensitive to the life of a young African-American man. The fact of the matter is he was drinking, fell asleep in the Wendy’s drive-thru. And they have already patted him down. He had no weapon on him. Where did they think he was going to go? So he’s running away. You got his car. You can easily find him. Get back up, but, no, you fire bullets into his back. That is not what you call corresponding force. So I think the mayor is right. This did not call for lethal force. And I don’t know what’s in the culture that would make this guy do that.”

He continued, “It has got to be the culture, it’s got to be the system. You’ve got an African-American woman mayor, you’ve got a woman police chief. So the sensitivities that we look for in people are there. But it’s not engrained in the institution. That’s why I’ve been saying you’ve got to restructure our judicial system, restructure our health care system, restructure our educational system. We know that. All of these things have been put together in order to maintain suppression of African-Americans all the way back to 1865. People forget reconstruction didn’t last for 12 years. All the stuff that we talk about reconstruction, that’s not reconstruction. We institutionalized second-class citizenship of black people during the Jim crow era. I get a little upset when I hear people say, well, you know, the civil rights movement was the second reconstruction. Come on now. What you have is confederacy what you’ve got. The first one reacted to slavery. Now we have a second one in the ‘60s reacting to brown V board of education in Topeka, Kansas. And now you have another one taking place. I would just say this is the second cog of the second one.”

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