[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 162 (2016), Part 4]
[House]
[Pages 4566-4567]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




        THE WRETCHED STATE OF RACIAL RELATIONS IN AMERICA TODAY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 6, 2015, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from Florida (Mr. 
Grayson) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. GRAYSON. Mr. Speaker, I would like to discuss something that may 
not otherwise be discussed this year in this Congress: the wretched 
state of racial relations in America today.
  We passed a bill here about a month ago in the House of 
Representatives to eliminate the term ``Oriental'' from the law books. 
I submit that eliminating a term does not eliminate the racism that 
embodies that term, and I think it is about time that we recognize what 
this problem is, the fact that it still festers in America, and give 
some thought to what we can do about it.
  I want to begin by relating two stories, both from my home State of 
Florida. The first one involves a 16-year-old girl. She was White. She 
had an encounter with police officers who were also White. She lived on 
the Atlantic Coast, which is largely White, and I heard about this from 
a friend of a friend.
  What happened to her is that her parents got a call from the police 
officers late one night. They didn't tell her why they were calling, 
but they said: You have to come to this location. We need to talk to 
you about your daughter. She is here with us.
  The mother went to that location, spoke to the White police officers. 
They informed her that her daughter had been drinking in a car with her 
boyfriend, and they needed to take her home. She was shaken up a bit, 
so was the daughter, but everybody ended that night alive.
  Now I want to tell you a different story. It didn't end so nicely. 
This was on the Gulf Coast, the coast of Florida that is heavily 
African American; and on the Gulf Coast one night there was a theme 
park, you could call it a fairgrounds, that was open to all students 
without having to pay. They could go on the rides, enjoy themselves one 
day each year. This is done in Tampa.
  Now, teenagers being teenagers, some of them got a little bit out of 
hand. Many African Americans frequent that area, and they were out in 
force that night at the fairgrounds. There was a great deal of friction 
that night between the White police force and the African American 
teenagers who were there that night.
  Some of them actually started running around, might have bumped into 
a few other people as they were running around. Someone started to 
scream. You will notice that apart from that physical contact, nothing 
I described is actually against the law, like, for instance, drinking 
in a car with your boyfriend when you are 16 years old.
  A number of them, about a hundred African American youths, were 
arrested that night 2 years ago in Tampa. The White police officers 
insisted that they strip to the waist. That apparently was for the 
purpose, in the minds of the police officers, to see whether they had 
gang colors on their bodies--at least, that is what they said.
  Now, one of them, Andrew Joseph III, actually hadn't done any of that 
running around, any of that screaming, any of that casual bumping. He 
hadn't done any of that, but he saw his classmates being arrested. He 
came to see what was going on. He saw that one of them had his hat fall 
off his head. He went over and he picked it up. The officer said: I 
didn't say you could do that.
  They arrested him for picking up his friend's hat. They took Andrew 
Joseph, a 14-year-old boy, 2 miles away from the fairgrounds, and they 
pushed him out of the police car and said: You are on your own.
  A 14-year-old boy who has parents who were reachable by a telephone, 
they pushed him out in a neighborhood he had never seen before, never 
been to before, had no idea where he was. He remembered that his father 
was going to pick him up at the fairgrounds. He felt pretty shaken up 
because he had just been arrested and was told to strip to the waist 
and, frankly, felt humiliated.
  He found his way, as best he could, back to the fairgrounds 2 miles 
away. He didn't call his parents because, frankly, he was scared, 
embarrassed, didn't want them to know. He almost got as far as the 
fairgrounds. He tried to cross the interstate highway to get to the 
fairgrounds. In the midst of traffic in both directions, he was struck 
by a car and died right on the spot, immediately.
  One 16-year-old girl, White, alive today; one 14-year-old boy, 
African American, dead.
  This is his picture, Andrew Joseph III. This is what this boy looked 
like. He was a good student, quite an athlete, had a wonderful future 
ahead of him. But not being White, his parents didn't get a call that 
night to say to come pick him up.
  I submit to you, this is not just one person's tragedy. It is not 
just the tragedy of these parents standing at his gravesite. It is the 
tragedy of America. We persist in being a country of sometimes casual 
racism, racism that sometimes goes unnoticed.
  If you say a bad word that begins with the letter N and there happens 
to be a recording device nearby, you will certainly be scolded and to 
some degree held accountable, that much is true. But institutionalized 
racism, racial profiling, redlining is not treated the same way because 
it is just too hard. It is much like the concept that, if we close our 
eyes to it, it will somehow disappear. A 1-year-old, maybe a 2-year-old 
might think that way, but a country of 330 million, why do we ever 
think that way?
  Now, I wish I could tell you that the story somehow had a happy 
ending. It doesn't. This kind of institutionalized racism goes on 
today. I asked the FBI to investigate whether there is racial profiling 
by the police force in Tampa. They are thinking about it. I don't know 
if they are going to say yes or they are going to say no. I can't tell 
for sure. That is their decision, not mine.
  I remember when I was a boy, a great man said he hoped to see a day 
in America where his four children were judged not by the color of 
their skin but by their character. I submit to you, this boy was judged 
by the color of his skin, and he is not the only one.
  We live in an America today, a country where 29 percent of White 
adults have college degrees; 18 percent of African Americans have 
college degrees. If Andrew Joseph III had lived, then his chance of 
getting a college degree would have been stunted, perhaps even 
forbidden, by the color of his skin.
  Now, if he had lived, whether or not he had gone to college, he would 
have grown up in a country where African Americans like him have an 
average household income of $37,000. Whites have an average income of 
$57,000. The color of his skin, you could say, if he lived, would have 
cost him $20,000 a year. That is our new poll tax, $20,000 a year.
  If he had managed to get across that highway--I imagine him being 
picked up safely by his father that night, whom you see here on my 
right--then, as an African American male, his life expectancy would 
have been 73 years. The life expectancy of White males in this country, 
including me, is 78 years. Now, it is a great tragedy--a great, great 
tragedy--that we stole 50 years of life from this one boy, but how much 
greater tragedy is it that we steal 5 years of life from 40 million?
  We are in danger at this point of becoming a society that is not 
colorblind, not blind to color, but, rather, a country that is blind to 
racism. There is an easy way to end this problem. It is called doing 
something about it. It is called pulling ourselves together in the same 
way that we began to do in the 1960s: acknowledging these differences, 
and then remedying them.
  I well recall that in the current Presidential election, the former 
Governor of my State, Jeb Bush, spent $125 million on his campaign and 
got four votes--four votes, convention votes. But I remember that it 
never came up that Jeb Bush wiped out, destroyed, eliminated, blew up 
affirmative action

[[Page 4567]]

in my State of Florida--and now it is gone.
  So the question before us is, writ small: How do we acknowledge that 
Black lives matter? How do we acknowledge that a terrible tragedy took 
place here and robbed this good young man of his life? And, writ large, 
what do we finally do--finally, finally, finally--50 years after the 
civil rights movement began, to end inequality in this country, end it?
  It starts with justice, and it ends with equality. Not just the 
pablum of equality of opportunity, that buzz phrase that we use in 
order to solve our consciences, but, rather, the equality of results: 
an America where an African American boy is just as likely to go to 
college as a White boy; an America where an African American is just as 
likely to earn as much money as a White, and, for God's sake, an 
African American can live as long as a White man does.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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