Steven W Thrasher - Black lives don't matter, apparently, to Republican candidates for president
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Do black lives matter to the Republican Party?
The answer was a resounding no if the Thursday night Republican primary debate on Fox News accurately reflected their views.
As Americans across the nation have been talking about the one-year anniversary of the killing of Mike Brown this weekend – which brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the forefront of the national political consciousness over the past year – Fox News dedicated less than two minutes out of a two-hour political debate to questions about police violence, racism or any of the ways black America has been undeniably and uniquely under attack in modern society.
One immediately apparent sign of the party’s disregard for black America’s woes was that it was held in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. It’s been widely reported that black people are disproportionately harmed by the mortgage market. So it was fitting that Fox hosted the first debate of Republicans – a party which is mostly white – in a stadium named for the kind of business that disproportionately rips off black people.
Fox then proceeded to fill up the room and its screens with female Fox News journalists (who looked like they were in a casting call for a roll as a Hitchcock blonde), a couple of white dude moderators, a stage of nine white men (and Dr Ben Carson) vying to be president – and an overwhelmingly white audience.
Having never really watched Fox News before for any period of time, I was surprised at the quality of the questions the moderators posed. In the first hour, they were often tough and engaging, and I liked how with such a crowded field, they’d get two candidates to talk to and debate one another.
But it wasn’t until until at least an hour and a half into the two-hour debate when Megyn Kelly asked Wisconsin governor Scott Walker about how “many in the Black Live Matter movement, and beyond, believe that overly aggressive police officers targeting young African Americans is the civil rights issue of our time. Do you agree? And if so, how do you plan to address it? And if not, why not?”
The framing of the question was limiting, giving Walker the setup he needed to give an easy and uncontroversial kind of answer. He reduced the problem of black lives mattering to “training” the “very few” bad-apple cops who act racist. The whole exchange, the only shoutout given to Black Lives Matter, lasted less than a minute.
But Black Lives Matter is about so much more than bad police. It’s about structural racism. It’s about systematic oppression. It’s about how more Americans, according to a recent poll, believe black Americans are treated unfairly now than they did in 2007.
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Walker addressed none of this, and Kelly didn’t think the topic was worthy of asking anyone else (unlike when she asked at least four candidates if they had “received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first”). Even more awkwardly, Kelly directed the last question of the night to Carson, asking him what he’d do about “race relations.”
Carson, who has previously called the Black Lives Matter movement “silly”, excoriated “the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it, and drive wedges into people.” Since he was given this question alone, without debating anyone, we didn’t get to hear more about what he meant and can only speculate which “purveyors” he was talking about.
But for all his downplaying of the role of racism, it was amusing to hear Carson become aware, earlier in the night, that he was getting the short end of the stick in the debate. The sole non-white candidate complained in the first hour, after going almost 50 minutes without a question, that he”wasn’t sure I was going to get to talk again.”
Not only did the Republicans seem unconcerned about black lives, they didn’t give a hoot about women either, practically bragging over who had defunded Planned Parenthood the most.
And they didn’t care much about gay rights, given how Kasich said he’d go to a same-sex friend’s wedding while still only believing in “traditional marriage.”
They certainly didn’t care much about trans rights, as former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee said the role of the military is not to engage in “social experiment[s]” or pay “for transgender surgery for soldiers,” but “to kill people and break things” – perhaps a motto for what America’s police do, too?
And Republicans certainly didn’t care about immigrants or their families, who were repeatedly referred as “illegals” as if they weren’t even human.
No, black lives certainly didn’t matter last night. But to the Republicans and Fox News, neither did the lives of women, immigrants, homosexuals, or transgender soldiers. All Americans should be offended at how limited an idea of America came across in a major party debate, and that the frontrunner, Donald Trump, said we are a nation which “can’t do anything right.”
This article was updated 7 August 2015 to correct the characterization of Quicken Loans. It is a mortgage company, not a payday lender.
No agenda here apparently. I'm just thankful that the writer helped me realize that the Republicans are killing the blacks. For some reason I thought it was the Dems killing the blacks. Who knew?
