South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg addressed the need to tackle systemic racism in a Chicago speech Tuesday as he continues to navigate heightened racial tensions in his city following a police shooting that has dominated his presidential campaign for two weeks.
Buttigieg said the nation’s policing, health care, housing and school systems all are “burdened by racism,” a condition he said threatens to undermine the nation’s future.
“All of American life takes place under these shadows, not some distant historical artifact but as burning present reality that hurts everyone and everything it touches. If we do not tackle the problem of racial inequality in my lifetime, I am convinced it will upend the American project in my lifetime,” Buttigieg said. “It brought our country to its knees once, and if we do not act, it could again. I believe this is not only a matter of justice, but a matter of national survival.”
In his bid to confront the issue, Buttigieg filled in some details of his “Douglass Plan,” an effort to create equality and economic prosperity for African Americans. The 37-year-old political wunderkind called for cutting the nation’s prison population in half, ending incarceration for drug possession, legalizing marijuana nationwide, expanding voting rights and creating a fund aimed at tripling the number of minority entrepreneurs.
Eliminating discrimination and inequality is not enough, Buttigieg said, as he argued the nation needs proactive policies to right historic wrongs by providing more opportunities for black Americans.
“For some time, the policy debate around race has taken place under the polite assumption that if we simply delete the racist policy and replace it with a neutral policy, then inequality will sort of work its way out of the system and take care of itself,” Buttigieg said. “Left without remedy, an injustice does not heal, it compounds.”
Buttigieg delivered the remarks during a business breakfast at the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition annual convention. He also was scheduled to attend a Chicago fundraiser Tuesday co-hosted by David Jacobson, who served as ambassador to Canada under former President Barack Obama.
The mayor’s visit to Chicago came a day after he announced a large fundraising haul of $24.8 million in the three-month period that ended Sunday and had received contributions from more than 400,000 individual donors, both of which are likely to cement him among the top candidates in the Democratic primary for months to come.
Still, Buttigieg has struggled to grow his appeal to African American voters. A CNN poll released Monday found him polling at 0% nationally among black voters.
“Look, when you’re new on the scene, and you’re not from a community of color, you need to work much harder in order to earn that trust, because trust is largely a function of quantity time. I’m committed to doing that work,” Buttigieg told reporters Tuesday when asked about his lagging support among black voters. “The most important question is, ‘Will our policy benefit black Americans and all Americans?’ And if that happens, and I can show that, I think the politics will start to take care of themselves.”
In making his case at Tuesday’s breakfast with more than 300 black business leaders, Buttigieg tried to emphasize the need for voters — and the press — to take note of his proposals. In doing so, he acknowledged how the tensions around the South Bend shooting have hampered his campaign.
“When a white elected official or politician is confronted with racial concerns, pundits often go right to political terms. You see articles about a white politician’s black problem,” Buttigieg said. “I am asked how I’m going to earn black votes in the polls 10 times more often than I am asked how my policies would actually benefit black Americans. It’s as if I’m being asked more about how to win than how to deserve to win.”
Still, Buttigieg tackled the South Bend shooting head-on in his speech, noting that his city continues to deal with a “racial gulf experience in which black residents and white residents experience every facet of life differently.” Despite efforts to improve equality and policing, Buttigieg said, “events compel me to acknowledge that whatever we’ve done has not been nearly enough.”
At the same time, he stressed that the problem is widespread and extends far beyond his city’s borders.
“This is deeper than politics. This is not just a political problem. It is not just a police problem. It is not just my problem and my city’s problem. And it is certainly not just a black problem,” Buttigieg said. “This is an American problem, and it requires nationwide American solutions.”
For more than two weeks, Buttigieg has grappled with the fallout from the fatal police shooting of Eric Logan in South Bend. The mayor has spent much of that time off of the campaign trail and back in his northern Indiana city of 100,000 holding meetings with community members, including an emotional town hall that at times featured angry residents shouting their displeasure at Buttigieg.
Before Buttigieg’s speech Tuesday, Jackson defended the mayor’s handling of the crisis.
“He’s handled an awkward situation well by being transparent,” the longtime civil rights leader said. Jackson added that media coverage of the situation had “missed the bigger picture” and that frustrations in South Bend are rooted in decades of policies, including redlining, that resulted in most African Americans segregated on one side of town.
Jackson said racial tensions also are rooted in the fact that, unlike in Chicago, South Bend officers are not required to live in the city, and therefore are not viewed as neighbors and community members but as an “occupying force.”
South Bend police Sgt. Ryan O’Neill, who is white, shot and killed Logan, a black 54-year-old robbery suspect, on June 16. Authorities have said O’Neill was responding to a 911 call of a man breaking into cars when he approached a vehicle and Logan emerged from it, refused to drop a knife and raised the weapon as he approached the officer. O’Neill shot Logan once in the right front abdomen, and an officer transported him in a squad car to a hospital, where he later was pronounced dead.
Neither O’Neill’s body camera nor his police dashboard camera recorded the shooting, which has sparked outrage from African Americans and activists in South Bend. Last week, the county prosecutor charged with investigating the shooting called for an independent investigation, which Buttigieg has backed, noting that it’s “vital that the investigation be fair, thorough and impartial.”
In a news conference Monday night, Buttigieg also announced he had heeded community members’ calls to request a review from the U.S. Department of Justice, though such civil rights reviews and investigations have become unlikely under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“The reality is the DOJ in this administration has shown considerably less interest in civil rights than it did under the last administration,” Buttigieg acknowledged Tuesday. “Still, I want to open a discussion about the different ways in which federal support could make a difference.”
In addition to reaching out to Washington, Buttigieg has said his city would review and request public input on policing policies, evaluate how officers are trained and approach the need to hire more African American officers with a “new sense of urgency,” an area in which he said during last week’s televised presidential debate that he had failed to get the job done. The mayor also said he would seek more community input on appointments to the city’s public safety board that oversees policing issues and disciplinary matters while beefing up funding for that body.
Buttigieg has emphasized that he is taking all of those steps without picking sides in the ongoing investigation into the Logan shooting. But the South Bend Fraternal Order of Police has accused the mayor of painting all officers as racist.
“Mayor Buttigieg has repeatedly shown that he’s more concerned about boosting his own presidential political campaign than ensuring a fair investigation about an incident where a veteran police officer was forced to defend himself when a dangerous felon attacked him with an 8-inch hunting knife,” South Bend FOP President Harvey Mills said in a Monday statement. “On a national TV debate, the mayor called our entire police force racist.”
Buttigieg has not called the department or officers racist, but repeatedly has said that police and their work are burdened by historic racism in how they are perceived by communities of color.
“One of the things that I really need to continue conveying to our police officers is that it is not anti-police to be pro-racial justice,” Buttigieg told reporters Tuesday. “On the contrary, we absolutely can and absolutely must do both.”
Twitter @BillRuthhart
