Speaking on Tuesday on the floor of the Senate to support the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, which he introduced with Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) last week, Virginia Democrat senator Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton’s running mate in 2016, snapped, “The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody; we created it.”
Kaine said, “We need to ban racial and religious profiling. We need to hold police officers and police departments accountable for violent, reckless behavior. We need to promote better training and professional accreditation of police departments. Madame President, why do we demand that universities maintain accreditation to receive federal funds but make no such demand of law enforcement agencies?”
Kaine then continued with his version of history, insinuating that there were still structures in the American system that were racist, adding that America “created” slavery:
And we need to do much more. Within the criminal justice system, but also within all of our systems, to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state and local governments carefully erected and maintained over centuries. We know a little bit about this in Virginia. The first African-Americans and into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619. They were slaves; they’d been captured against their will but they landed in colonies that didn’t have slavery. There were no laws about slavery in the colonies at that time. The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody; we created it. It got created by the Virginia General Assembly and the legislatures of other states; it got created by the court systems in colonial America (unintelligible) that enforced fugitive slave laws.
We created it. And we created it and maintained it over centuries. And in my lifetime, we have finally stopped the practices but we’ve never gone back to undo it. Stopping racist practices after 350 or 400 years but then taking no effort to dismantle them is not the same as truly combatting racism.
Kaine ignored some rather salient facts: the United States did not create slavery, not even on the American continent. In fact, in 1619, the United States did not exist. British colonists imported slaves to America. Spanish colonists held slaves in the New World long prior to 1619, and began importing African slaves to Hispaniola in 1501; the first African slaves arrived in Spanish Florida in 1526. Slavery was not uncommon among Native American tribes, either. In fact, slavery has been the rule rather than the exception among human civilizations for nearly all of time, and it remained to Western civilization to destroy the institution.
Then he pandered for the youth vote, saying, “But I’m mindful of the challenge laid down by our young people. No more politics as usual.”
Kaine took aim at Congress:
It’s one thing to introduce a bill, we do that all the time here. So often, the introduction of the bill is all that occurs; no committee hearing, no committee mark-up, no committee vote, no floor debate, no floor vote, no signature by a president. Merely words on a page and a one-day story. And then possibly a blame game about who was at fault for nothing happening. That’s been my biggest disappointment in 7 ½ years in the Senate.
Unlike my service at the state and local levels, where we took action and then engaged in healthy competition about who should get credit, in Congress it’s too often a story about inaction and then an unproductive competition over who should be blamed for nothing getting done. Politics as usual.
He concluded, “I pray that the engaged actions of our citizens has brought us to a new moment that will compel us to act in ways large and small in accord with the equality ideal that we profess to believe. This bill is a test of our resolve and I urge my colleagues to meet the moment so that we can look our young people in their faces and tell them that we truly heard them.”
Video below:
Sen. Tim Kaine: "The United States didn't inherit slavery from anybody. We created it." pic.twitter.com/VM86sRrtn1
— The Hill (@thehill) June 16, 2020
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