An RNC speaker said it would be 'smart' for the police to racially profile her biracial son because of 'statistics'
In a recent video, Abby Johnson, who's set to speak at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday, condoned the police racially profiling her biracial son.
Citing "statistics," Johnson said that it "doesn't actually make me angry" that a police officer "would be more careful around my brown son than my white son."
Statistically, the police in the US are far more likely to use force against Black people than white people.
Johnson told Insider she had no regrets about sharing the video or the sentiments expressed in it.
Abby Johnson, an anti-abortion-rights activist with a top speaking spot on the second night of the Republican National Convention, in a video posted on YouTube in late June condoned the police racially profiling her biracial son.
"Statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons," Johnson said in the video, reported by Vice News.
"I recognize that I'm going to have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned white sons as they grow up," Johnson said.
She described her son Jude as "an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy."
"But one day, he's going to grow up, and he's going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man," she said. "And my other boys are probably going to look like nerdy white guys."
In the video, Johnson appeared to defend the disproportionate rate at which Black men are arrested and incarcerated, ignoring the centuries of racist policymaking that led the US to this point.
"Statistically, I look at our prison population, and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes," she said. "So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they're going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons."
YouTube
Johnson went on to say that it "doesn't actually make me angry" that a police officer "would be more careful around my brown son than my white son." She said that would make the officer "smart" because of "statistics."
At another point, Johnson said she would be angry if a police officer treated her "brown son violently, more violently than my white son."
Johnson's video first went up in June amid nationwide protests over police brutality. The conservative website Daily Caller initially reported on it, and it has since been made private, per Vice News.
Johnson told Insider she had no regrets about sharing the video or the sentiments expressed in it.
"I only made it private because of violent threats that were being made against my family," Johnson said. "You know, from the 'tolerant left.'"
Statistically, the police are far more likely to treat Johnson's biracial son violently than her white son.
As Insider reported earlier this summer during the protests following the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police, in the US, where Black people are disproportionately incarcerated and killed by the police, researchers have found widespread evidence of systemic racism in policing.
Data on policing in Chicago indicated that even though white people were more likely to resist arrest, the police used more force against Black citizens than any other race, on average.
A Northeastern-Harvard study released in April, for example, found that Black Americans were at greater risk of being killed by the police even though they were less likely to pose an objective threat to law enforcement. Researchers looked through shooting deaths by police across 27 states in 2014 and 2015, based on details from police and medical-examiner reports from the National Violent Death Reporting System.
"One in 15 firearm deaths is at the hands of police; among African-Americans it's about one in 10," Matt Miller, a Northeastern professor, said in a report on the study. "Which isn't to say that these shootings are all unjustified. But it sure makes you feel like we should try really hard to figure out how to use less lethal ways of arresting someone's threatening behavior."
Though Black people make up roughly 13% of the US population, data analyzed by The Washington Post indicates that they are killed by the police at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Black people are also incarcerated at much higher rates than white people, making up roughly 33% of the adult US prison population as of 2017, per the Pew Research Center; white people, who make up 64% of the overall population, made up 30% of the prison population.
Opponents of the Black Lives Matter movement, including white supremacist groups, often cherry-pick statistics on crime and homicide to misleadingly present Black people as inherently criminal and violent against white people. The sentiments Johnson shared in the YouTube video echoed these racist tropes in defense of racial profiling, including in the hypothetical scenario involving her biracial son.
The reality is that the vast majority of violent crime is intraracial, not interracial. And the vast majority of Black people do not commit violent crimes.
But it's not just white supremacist groups perpetuating these racist myths about Black people.
Studies have found that local news disproportionately characterizes Black people as perpetrators of crime while portraying white people as victims. But Black people are far more likely than other races to be the victims of violent crime in the US, which remains fairly violent compared with other developed countries.
"Research has found that many young black men — the group most likely to be perpetrators and victims of gun homicides — suffer from a condition similar to PTSD, brought on by repeated exposure to violence, extreme poverty, high unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and other social ills that create a sense of hopelessness," Shirley Carswell, a lecturer at Howard University, wrote in The Post last month.
"When white men respond to their life circumstances with gun violence, it's treated as a public health problem, brought on by mental illness and stress," Carswell said. "When black men do, it's portrayed almost solely as a criminal issue, caused by lawlessness and moral failing."
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