[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 102 (Tuesday, June 2, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2652-S2655]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                                 RACISM

  Mr. BOOKER. Mr. President, I rise today with difficulty. I admit I am 
like so many other Americans who are hurting right now and frustrated 
right now and feeling a torrent of emotions that I wish I could say it 
was the first time I felt like this.
  I want to begin my remarks in a different way because the names that 
we are hearing shouted on streets--George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna 
Taylor--are like so many other names of people that we did not know as 
a Nation. They were not household names. Their names now are mixed into 
names that we have heard throughout my entire lifetime. But their 
names--and the way we say them mixed with horror and sadness and 
tragedy--it does not speak to their beauty, their humanity, the 
fullness, the texturedness of their lives. I just want to say that 
Ahmaud Arbery was a man, and he was 25 years old when he was murdered. 
He went out jogging where he was hunted by two White men who walked 
free for weeks after killing him.
  This man, this child of God, his loved ones talked to his humanity. 
They said he was a loving son, a brother, an uncle, a nephew, a cousin, 
and a friend. He was humble. He was kind. He was

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well mannered. He always made sure that he never departed his loved 
ones without saying ``I love you.''
  Breonna Taylor, before we knew her name--an extraordinary American, 
an extraordinary servant--she was a first responder. In a pandemic, 
like so many of our first responders, she showed a courage and humble 
heroism. She was 26 years old when she was shot and killed by police, 
asleep in her home. She was an emergency medical technician in 
Louisville.
  Her loved ones, too, shared the truth of her spirit. They said 
Breonna Taylor was full of life. She loved social gatherings with her 
friends and especially her family. She loved life and all it had to 
offer. She continued to find ways to better herself and all of the 
people around her.
  George Floyd, he was a man that was raised in Texas. He was a Houston 
man. To his friends and loved ones, he was known as Floyd. In high 
school--I know this--he was an athlete, playing both basketball and 
football. He played the position I played; he was a tight end. He went 
on to play basketball at South Florida State College, a pathway I know 
to college ball. His girlfriend called him ``an angel that was sent to 
us on Earth.'' His family remembered him as being family oriented, 
loving, and godly.
  Floyd was a loving father. He was a devoted brother. He was a 
partner, and he was a friend. He is dead at 46 years old, on May 25, 
2020, when he was restrained, pinned by his neck, and killed by law 
enforcement officers.
  The killings of George Floyd, of Breonna Taylor, of Ahmaud Arbery are 
singular in their pain, are singular in their particular details in the 
anguish and the horror, but this is a terror that is familiar. It is a 
fear that is baked now, cemented into our culture.
  For so many Americans, especially Black Americans, this has not just 
not been a tough few weeks. It has not just been an emotional time 
because of what we are seeing, the protests all around the country. 
This has been a tough life. This is the story of day after day after 
day that punctuates our consciousness only when someone captures on 
videotape what is a regular part of the fabric of our country.
  We have a long and wretched and disturbing history in this country of 
Black people being murdered by law enforcement. Our systems of 
accountability, our systems of transparency, our ability to end this 
has improved impotent and feeble. These killings for so many Black 
Americans today are searing reminders that Black people in this 
country, as I have heard from dozens of people in my life, as we hear 
from people on our media, that this could have been me; that this even 
would have been me in the same circumstances. To hear people at all 
stations of life--African-Americans saying--``I am alive,'' but 
questioning for how long, slipping into the savage reality of despair 
for your life and your safety.
  To be Black in America is to know that a misunderstanding, that an 
implicit racial bias, that an interaction that should be everyday and 
routine can become a moment where your life is turned upside down, 
where your body becomes broken or when you are killed. It is a common 
experience. This has been a stretch where bird watching in a park, to 
jogging in your neighborhood, to going to a corner store, it is a 
jarring reminder that is reinforced by personal experiences that it 
could be you.
  I was born to two civil rights activist parents. I was a big kid. I 
was over 6 feet by the time I was in seventh or eighth grade, and it 
was a time in my life that is a coming of age for so many people and 
cultures across our Nation. But something began happening to me in that 
period, and it was marked by the fear of my elders. Family members with 
jarring personal stories for a preteen or a teen would tell me what it 
meant to be Black, to be male in America. They were instilling fear in 
me as a survival mechanism. They were trying to make me aware of my 
surroundings.

  I have difficult memories of trips to the malls with elder Black men 
in my family and being lectured about what I couldn't do, what I 
shouldn't do, and what the consequences could be. I remember that talk 
with my parents where I tried to joke about it, but they got chillingly 
angry with me about what it meant to have a driver's license in America 
and what could happen to me. They told me stories of friends, of family 
members, of others and their experiences with the police.
  I spent those years of 12 and 13 in an America in the '70s and '80s 
where the words of my parents and elders were backed up with tragic and 
terrible stories of their experiences in generations before and were 
reinforced by my own experiences: being followed by mall security 
guards, being accused or stopped, being looked at with suspicion, and 
experience after experience after experience with police.
  I remember as a college student--and it all came to a head where I 
wrote a column in Stanford's newspaper: Why have I lost control? I 
remember that night writing that column like it was yesterday. I was so 
overcome with emotion and rage, and I would like to submit for the 
Record that column and read right now pieces of what I wrote that night 
that when I look at young men on the streets of America today and I see 
their anger and I see their rage, it brings me back, not to that 
moment, but to the own feelings that have churned within me for years.
  I will read from the column: Why have I lost control?

       How can I write, when I have lost control of my emotions? 
     Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty.
       Not shocked. Why not?
       Turn off the engine! Put your keys, driver's license, 
     registration and insurance on the hood now! Put your hands on 
     the steering wheel and don't even think of moving.
       Five police cars. Six officers surrounded my car, guns 
     ready. Thirty minutes I sat, praying and shaking, only 
     interrupted by the command, ``I said, don't move!''
       Finally, ``Everything checks out, you can go.''
       Sheepishly I asked, why.
       ``Oh, you fit the description of a car thief.''
       Not guilty. Not shocked. Why not.
       In the jewelry store, they lock the case when I walk in.
       In the shoe store, they help the White man who walks in 
     after me.
       In the shopping mall, they follow me--in the Stanford 
     shopping mall. Last month I turned and faced their 
     surreptitious security: ``Catch any thieves today?''
       Not guilty. Not shocked. Why not?
       I am a black man. I am 6 foot 3 inches tall and 230 pounds, 
     just like Rodney King. Do I scare you? Am I a threat? Does 
     your fear justify your actions? Twelve people [a jury] 
     believed it did.
       Black male: Guilty until proven innocent.
       Reactions to my kind are justified. Scrutiny is justified. 
     Surveillance is justified. Search is justified. Fifty-six 
     blows justified.
       Justice? Dear God.
       I graduated from Stanford last June. I was elated. I was 
     one of four presidents of my class--I was proud. In the fall, 
     I received a Rhodes Scholarship. I approached arrogance.
       But late one night, as I walked the streets of Palo Alto, 
     as the police car slowed down while passing me, as his steely 
     glare met me, I realized that to him and to so many others I 
     am and [may] always be--

  And I substitute now--

     --I am and may always be the [N-word]: Guilty until proven 
     innocent.
       I am struggling to be articulate, loquacious, positive, 
     constructive, but for the first time in so long, I have lost 
     control of my emotions: Rage, frustration, bitterness, 
     animosity, exasperation, sadness. Emotions once suppressed, 
     emotions once channeled, now are let loose. Why?
       Not guilty. Not shocked.
       Poverty, alienation, estrangement, continuously aggravated 
     by racism, overt and institutional. Can you leave your 
     neighborhood without being stopped? Can you get a loan from 
     your bank? Can you be trusted at your store?
       Can you get an ambulance dispatched to your neighborhood? 
     Can you get the police to come to your house? Can you get an 
     education at your school? Can you get a job? Can you stay 
     alive past 25? Can you get respect? Can you be heard?
       No! Not until someone catches on video one small glimpse of 
     your everyday reality and even then, can you get justice?
       Why have I lost control of my emotions? Why do my hands 
     shake as I write? Tonight, I have no answers.
       Dear God, help us to help ourselves before we become our 
     own undoing.

  That was three decades ago. That was me as an early 20-something, 
writing about another one of those names that has become household. We 
remember it decades later. I wish I could stand here and tell you that 
much has changed for the experience of that young Black man. I wish I 
could tell you that that was the end of names becoming household words, 
but it has not.
  This is a cycle of violence in our country; these spasms jerk us from 
our comfort and pull us into the world that is faced by so many 
African-Americans and then we go back. So many of us go back to what is 
now normal in America, what has been normal in America.
  This cycle--I hear people now talking about the violence, the 
rioters. I condemn it in the same way that the other

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99 Members are. It is awful, it is despicable, it is contrary to the 
aims of this Nation and the movements of our past. But to condemn the 
violence of those out there doing such awful, destructive, 
condemnation-worthy actions, but to only condemn them and not to 
condemn the fullness of that cycle of violence because there is 
violence going on even when we don't see it in the streets.
  Peace, even, is not just the absence of violence; it is the presence 
of justice. This is an unjust cycle in our country that we seem to be 
stuck in that makes the names of children like Tamir Rice household 
names. It is connected with the violence that is pervasive in our 
Nation that demands all of us to speak out against with the same fervor 
and enthusiasm and energy that people are condemning the violence we 
are seeing in America today. To fail to do that leaves us in a state of 
imbalance. To fail to condemn the totality of violence in our country 
leaves us far from the beloved community. We need to somehow find a way 
out of that cycle.
  There is violence in our Nation seen and our environment, that we 
still are a Nation where a person's race is the single biggest factor 
of whether they live near a toxic site or not. Ask the mother of a 
child who drank lead water for months and months and has had their 
brain permanently damaged if that was not violence. It is violence to 
not have access to quality care. Ask the woman who has lost her child 
because of lack of prenatal care. Ask the Black woman in America, who 
today is four times more likely to die, herself, in childbirth if this 
isn't a violence in our society that needs condemnation. It is violence 
we see from our healthcare system, to our criminal justice system, to 
environmental injustice, to the denial, as one author says, of the 
savage inequalities within our education systems.
  It is why so many Black Americans scream out: Do you see me? I do not 
have your equal justice under law. Do you see me? I do not have justice 
for all. Do you see me? I matter. I matter. Black lives matter. Black 
bodies matter. America, I love you. Do you see me? Do you know my 
experiences? Do you see the failings of our ideals?
  The murder of a Black man by multiple cops who knew they were being 
filmed in broad daylight is not the extent of the problem of racism in 
America. It is a final and deadly manifestation of that racism of a 
nation where everything about us is interwoven, it is interconnected, 
and we are in relationship with each other.
  This ideal that we are one Nation is not a quaint ideal. It is an 
inescapable fact of American society. The pain and the hurt of our 
brothers or sisters is our pain. I can show you that economically. I 
can show you that by every ideology that is expressed here on the floor 
of this Senate.
  The cycle of violence has to stop, the cycle of wretchedness and 
hurt. Our ancestors scream out at us now. Millions of Americans scream 
out right now, and I know we have an obligation in this body to do 
something.
  I have heard words from people on both sides of the aisle speaking 
toward the injustice of racism that exists in our country. I have heard 
words. But for generations what they sought from this body--greater men 
and women that any of us--what they sought on the streets, what they 
sought in front of the White House, from Alice Paul, the first person 
to protest out there, was legislative changes. That is what they 
sought.
  The march on Washington. Disability activists were throwing 
themselves out in front of buses. They fought for tangible legislation.
  Martin Luther King said:

       While it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, 
     behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot 
     change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be 
     true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep 
     him from lynching me.

  It is on us. The cries for justice in the street, it is on us. The 
pain being made manifest for all America to see, it is on us. Those who 
have been comfortable for too long are now pulled from their seats as 
they stare at a television that shows them a window into a nation that 
is not at rest. It is on us in this body to do something, to change the 
law. We can do that.
  In the coming days, Senator Kamala Harris and I have partnered 
together on a comprehensive police reform proposal that takes into 
account the incredible work of Congressional Black Caucus members, many 
of them who have been in this congressional body much longer than I 
have. They have been working on these issues much longer than I have. 
It takes the work of so many people in both of the bodies that make up 
our Congress and pulls them together.
  There are so many injustices, but this comprehensive package is about 
police accountability. It is an answer to the pain, to the hurt, and 
the agony. It speaks to the young children whose parents right now are 
teaching them fear as an art of survival, teaching them not to be a 
threat to anyone who could kill you, to try to shrink from the fullness 
of your body so that they don't take your body, they don't harm your 
body, and they don't kill your body. It creates accountability and 
transparency and practices that can repair police community relations. 
It can give faith back to those who have lost it. It can rescue people 
who are slipping into a deeper despair about this Nation and perhaps 
cobble together some semblance of hope.

  This is a moment in American history where we must recognize the hurt 
and the pain and do something about it where this body that has so 
nobly acted in past years to pass legislation--the 1964 Civil Rights 
Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the spasms of 1968. Fair housing 
laws were passed.
  I said I come to you today torn up inside. As so many Americans, the 
soil of our souls have been plowed up in pain, hoping for seeds of 
possibility, hoping that somehow, borne out of agony and despair, can 
sprout a new harvest for America.
  As a man who believes in this country and believes in the ideals of 
hope and love and faith and charity and kindness, I want to confess to 
you something, that right now hope is essential, but it is not enough. 
I confess to you, right now, words of kindness and grace are essential 
to America, but they are not enough right now. I confess to you even 
something that is hard to admit, that the spirit of courage and grit 
being shown by people on the streets--not in the comfortable hallways 
of the Senate--who in one of the most noble traditions of our Nation 
are protesting, are petitioning their government, are peacefully 
gathering, I want to tell you, right now, that that is not enough. It 
is essential, but it is not enough. These things are necessary, but not 
sufficient.
  So how? How do we go forward? In Washington, the people talk about 
being so savagely broken. How? At a time that I worry about King's 
ideal of a beloved community, how do we create that out of this moment? 
I do not know.
  But I want to tell you this: When I find myself disturbed and sad, 
when I find my heart that, on most days, has an invincible hope for our 
Nation, I turn to our history, but I don't need to turn too far.
  I know the heroes whose names are hailed from generations past. I 
don't know how Harriet Tubman, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer 
mustered their strength and courage. They were marvelous magicians that 
could turn the most wretched of times into progress.
  So at a time that I need hope, I tell you I turn to the spiritual 
alchemists of our day. I met them. I have been to a church in South 
Carolina where White supremacists stormed in and murdered nine blessed 
souls. I have watched on a TV screen this spiritual alchemist who 
somehow turned the most unimaginable grief into forgiveness and a 
lesson for our Nation.
  I visited a church just a few months ago in Tulsa, OK. It was the 
last structure that was left standing out of one of the greatest acts 
of domestic terrorism we had ever seen--the torching, the bombing of 
Black Wall Street--and I met a pastor there, Pastor Turner. He is a 
great spiritual alchemist, who somehow turned the only remaining 
structure--after horrific violence--he somehow turned it into a symbol 
of struggle.
  I have talked to mothers of the movement. These are these great Black 
women whose sons were murdered and are names we now know. I learned 
from them this unbelievable demonstration of spiritual alchemy, that 
somehow they turned their tragedies into a grit and guts and a 
determination to never

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stop fighting as long as they have breath in their body and blood in 
their veins. They will fight for this Nation, even when it so savagely 
lets them down.
  I get strength from those in our Nation today who demonstrated 
alchemy greater than any power I can possess, that somehow, in our 
darkest of times, we still are a Nation that can find a way to ignite 
the world, in a Nation where so many people have been so thoroughly 
failed, that they can still manifest the ability to fight for the 
ideals that have been denied for them. They are the ones right now 
whose spirit we all must try to summon.
  We will come up short, but we must try to summon it. It is the only 
way forward that, somehow, this Nation that shares one spirit can find 
a way to put enough indivisible into this one nation under God, that 
somehow this great country can find a way in this time of our 
generation's great crisis--that we, like those before us, those 
magicians, those alchemists of love and spirit and sweat and struggle--
that out of this time of crisis, we can make this Nation truly one of 
liberty and justice for all.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. McSally). The Senator from Maryland.

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