Pete Buttigieg's Prescriptions for an America Sick With Racism

Pete Buttigieg got one thing wrong when he responded to the bigot on the Fourth of July. Later, the fact checkers would note that when he said that “a black person is four times as likely as a white person to be incarcerated for the exact same crime is evidence of systemic racism,” he fumbled the data from a 2013 ACLU study. But the mayor got the big picture right when responding to Dave Begley, a white, conservative blogger, at that July 4 Iowa event. Volunteering his solution for the friction between police and black residents of South Bend, Indiana, Begley told Buttigieg, “Just tell the black people of South Bend to stop committing crime and doing drugs.” The mayor, to his credit, responded as he should have.

“Sir, I think racism is not going to help us get out of this drama,” Buttigieg said. He later added that “racism makes it harder for good police officers to do their job, too. It is a smear on law enforcement.” It was a verbal preview of the anti-racist spirit animating his Douglass Plan, released at last in full detail on Thursday. Though not necessarily the first or even necessarily the most effective set of these measures yet to be released, by submitting to the public the most concentrated set of detailed proposals aimed at improving black American lives, Buttigieg has made it ridiculous for any candidate look afraid to draw up race-based policy. And he has made it unacceptable for the rest of the Democratic field to put forth anything less than what he has done.

Billed as “a comprehensive and intentional dismantling of racist structures and systems combined with an equally intentional and affirmative investment of unprecedented scale in the freedom and self-determination of Black Americans,” the set of Buttigieg proposals reads like a nearly complete set of reparative policies without the actual reparations checks.

Over the course of 18 pages, the policy document covers issues including voting rights, health policy, education, criminal justice reform, housing, and employment. It addresses racial disparities as specific and divergent as lead poisoning, black maternal death in childbirth, and lack of instruction about African American history in schools. While a bit of the list glances by certain issues with airy, promissory language, the Douglass Plan also offers many of the specifics that skeptics and critics (including myself) had been demanding.

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https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pete-buttigieg-racism-agenda-858597/