House Democrats intend to go big in their coming legislation to tackle systemic racism and patterns of violence against African Americans — a package responding …
House Democrats intend to go big in their coming legislation to tackle systemic racism and patterns of violence against African Americans — a package responding to the killing of an unarmed black man by Minneapolis police exactly two weeks ago.
The legislation, while centered around criminal justice reform, will seek to address racial disparities well outside the realm of law enforcement, delving into issues as varied as health care, education and environmental justice.
The strategy advances the notion that the plague of police violence against African Americans — as exposed in graphic fashion with the death of George Floyd last month — is a symptom of problems much more ingrained and ubiquitous than police reform can fix by itself.
As protesters have flooded streets in scores of cities around the country, Democrats see a unique opportunity to confront the systemic racial disparities that pervade virtually every swath of American life.
“We want to see this as a time where we can go forward in a very drastic way — not incrementally, but in an important way to redress those problems,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday. “We’re talking a long way back and a lot of injustice in it all.”
Piloting the effort are the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), who have been busy conducting tele-conferences and gathering policy recommendations from their Democratic colleagues and outside civil rights figures.
Some of those voices have suggested an approach that focuses solely on the criminal justice reforms most directly related to the killing of Floyd and several other victims of similar attacks this year — a list that includes Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man killed by white vigilantes while jogging in south Georgia in February, and Breonna Taylor,26, a medical technician killed by Louisville police during a botched drug raid in March.
Yet CBC leaders, backed by Pelosi and other members of the party brass, want to tap the current wave of public outrage to move sweeping reforms designed to fight racial injustice at its roots.
“I’m inclined to push the envelope as far as we can because we have a moment now,“ CBC Chairwoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.) told CBS News last week.
Floyd and the killings of African Americans by police is not the only factor driving the current national unrest.
