Republican Senator Lindsey Graham claims that systemic racism does not exist in America because a Black man was twice elected president, and a woman of color has been elected vice-president.
“America is not a racist country,” the South Carolina lawmaker told Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “Within every society, you have bad actors. The Chauvin trial was a just result.”
In his appearance Sunday, Graham decried what he called an “attack on police and policing,” complaining that Democrats are calling all police racist. He also declared that America is the “best place on the planet” while also saying it’s a “work in progress.”
Graham then referenced the remarks of President Joe Biden, who, after the guilty verdict of former Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin, said Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” that has become a “stain on our nation’s soul.”
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“In order to deliver real change and reform, we can and we must do more to reduce the likelihood that tragedies like this will ever happen and occur again,” Biden said in an address to the nation one week ago. “And this takes acknowledging and confronting, head-on, systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly.”
Graham said that Biden “spent a lot of time running the place down. I wish he would stop it.”
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His assertions aside, the election of two people of color in no way erases America’s long history of enslavement, Jim Crow, or bias against Blacks in housing, employment or the legal system.
In his interview with Wallace, Graham failed to acknowledge that while Vice President Kamala Harris was elected, a majority of his own party insists that the 2020 election was stolen. “The Big Lie,” as it has come to be known, led to a violent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, where more than 100 Capitol police officers were injured by a violent mob.
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