On Friday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sat down with attorney, civil rights advocate, and former Obama administration staffer Van Jones to have a very frank and surprisingly honest discussion about race in America.
Gingrich, who is rumored to be on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s short list, said something that will definitely not sit well with Trump’s “angry white man” voter base.
The former speaker said that white Americans “don’t understand being black in America,” as he reflected race relations across America.
It took me a long time and a number of people talking to me over the years to begin to get a sense of this: If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk,” Gingrich said.
The discussion followed the events in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Falcon Heights, Minnesota earlier this week; and the Dallas, Texas mass shooting which claimed the lives of five police officers during a peaceful protest against the previous shootings.
We’ve got to rethink what it means to be American and how we function together as an extended family,” Gingrich said.
Jones noted how the reactions to a black man bleeding to death in a car in Minnesota and police officers being shot in Dallas, invoked different emotions from different Americans.
When you’re one country and you’re one people, you cry at every funeral,” Jones said.
Jones said that he was raised to be “beyond respectful” to members of law enforcement.
Gingrich recalled his upbringing in a largely integrated community before arriving in 1960’s Georgia.
It was still legally segregated, which meant that the local sheriff and the National Guard and the government at large would impose by force taking away rights from Americans,” he said
We’ve come a fair distance — we have a black mayor of Atlanta, and have had a series of them. John Lewis has gone from marching on Selma to the Democratic whip in the U.S. Congress. We’ve made progress. But for some reason we’ve stalled out on the cultural, economic, practical progress we needed to parallel the fight over legality.
This conversation was an amazingly honest and sincere discussion, that America needs much more between conservatives and liberals, but also between people of different races.
Open and honest talks with the intent to learn will bear fruitful results, as opposed to close minded recitals of our preferred ideology’s talking points.
At the end of the day, people like Jones and Gingrich will not see eye to eye on everything. But when they sit down and actually talk to each other, their common understanding was expanded exponentially.
UPDATE: Just like clockwork…
Stay tuned… Trump's thinking on VP is evolving, based on multiple conversations this morning w/ top sources close to him.
— Robert Costa (@costareports) July 9, 2016
Featured image Screengrab via YouTube.
