The head of the union representing Philadelphia police officers, John McNesby, posted a message yesterday about an interesting omission from the program of the Democratic National Convention that his rank and file will be called upon to protect next week. McNesby noted that presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton and party leaders were "excluding the widows... and other family members of Police Officers killed in the line of duty who were victims of explicit, and not implied racism."
The Fraternal Order of Police's Lodge 5 leadership is evidently annoyed at the fact that family members of fallen police won't appear at the DNC even as the family members of seven black people killed around the country over the last few years have been tapped as DNC speakers.
The speakers' relatives died in circumstances that seem unjust, in some cases at the hands of police. Sadly, surviving members of their families chose to respond by creating a group, Black Lives Matter, that advertises racism in its name and on its website. The group appears to condemn any encounter a black person has with the law that doesn't end well for them as "state violence" and the work of anti-black racists. That a large proportion of the police force in big cities like Philly is black, that many of the allegedly racist encounters blacks have with police involve black police, and that several of the police who gave their lives in recent violence are black are all facts that seem lost on the group.
Black Lives Matter's founders have been asked to speak as a group at the DNC. McNesby drew attention to DNC organizers' seeming endorsement of Black Lives Matter. It gets a national platform while police survivors likely to present a different view will be kept silent.
Clinton's campaign responded to McNesby's statement by noting that two people it considered spokesmen for police would speak at the DNC, and a general statement about how much she claims to like police. But it's not clear that either police speaker (one of whom is former Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey) will speak to the issues raised by recent violence against police, at least some of which seems to be racially motivated. Nor will their words be as poignant as the words of survivors of slain officers, especially when other DNC speakers who are survivors of individuals killed by the police are likely to portray police generally in a very negative light.
One might accuse McNesby of being publicity hound, and his characterization of Black Lives Matter as a "terrorist group" makes them sound more significant than racist cranks. They don't deserve that. But he is right to call attention to Clinton's strange decision to showcase a racist group while excluding survivors of police who died under circumstances no less unjust than those of the racists' relatives.
Why would Clinton do this? Here's my take. Clinton owes her nomination to the votes of black people in Southern states that no Democrat will be able to carry in November. She thinks that black votes will also be essential to her in November, so she is taking steps to focus her party's attention on issues affecting black people. In doing so, she has overreached and placed her stamp of approval on a group that advocates racism as long as non-black people are the targets.
Looking back at the Democratic primaries, Clinton scored her biggest wins over Bernie Sanders in Deep South states where black people form by far the most important Democratic-voting group, and won across the wider South, where blacks' numbers make them more influential in the party than elsewhere in the country. Almost all of these states have mostly Republican electorates that send Republicans to Washington.
Throughout the rest of the country, including states where Democrats are dominant or competitive, Sanders ran strong and often defeated Clinton. She needed wins in Southern states that will be unwinnable in the fall to secure the nomination. Clinton owes black people much for big victories in the South that offset her weakness elsewhere.
Attempting to pay back that debt by pandering to an unrepresentative, outspokenly racist black group at the DNC could cost Clinton in November in her race against Donald Trump. McNesby won't be the only person to call Clinton out for racist demagoguery.
Indeed, within Clinton's own party, most members are of a kind Black Lives Matter purists would regard as racially inferior. They aren't black. And members of this genetically compromised majority of Democrats were much more likely to vote against Clinton in the primaries than were black Democrats. If too many of them are turned off by Clinton's attempt to turn out the hate vote among black people, she will lose close races in states outside the South, Pennsylvania included.
