In his speech yesterday, President Obama said that the Minnesota & Louisiana shootings are not isolated.
This was right before the shooting of the white police officers in Dallas.
Do you think President Obama’s rhetoric is helping or hurting race relations in the US?
President Barack Obama called on American law enforcement to root out bias in its ranks and said all Americans should be troubled by frequent police shootings of blacks and Hispanics, insisting that fatal incidents in Minnesota and Louisiana are not isolated.
Adding his voice to a growing public outcry, Obama said the shootings were symptoms of a “broader set of racial disparities” in the justice system that aren’t being fixed quickly enough.
He ticked through a list of statistics he said showed concerns about bias are real: African-Americans being shot by police or arrested at more than twice the rate of white Americans.
“When incidents like this occur, there’s a big chunk of our fellow citizenry that feels as if it’s because of the color of their skin, they are not being treated the same,” Obama said. “And that hurts. And that should trouble all of us.”
Obama’s diagnosis of the problem reflected a growing sense of frustration and willingness to speak out publicly about police killings despite the risk of making law enforcement officers feel under attack.
The president spoke in a hastily arranged appearance at a hotel in Warsaw just after arriving in Poland for a NATO summit. He largely echoed comments he made earlier in the day in a Facebook post as the two deaths were increasingly capturing the country’s attention.
Via the AP