Newt Gingrich has weighed in on the fatal shootings of five Dallas police officers, saying that "normal, white" Americans do not understand the "level of discrimination" and other risks that blacks face.
"It took me a long time, and a number of people talking to me through the years to get a sense of this," the former Georgia congressman and House speaker said on
Facebook Live.
"If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America. And you instinctively under-estimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk … It is more dangerous to be black in America.
"It's both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story, but it is more dangerous in that you are substantially more likely to end up in a situation where the police don't respect you, or you easily get killed…. For whites, it's difficult to appreciate how real that it is, how it's an everyday danger."
Gingrich, who is in the running to be Donald Trump's vice-presidential running mate, said unlike African American parents, white parents do not have to instruct their teenage sons to take extra care in dealing with police officers because it is "not part of your normal experience."
Gingrich's remarks — during a conversation with Van Jones, his former colleague on CNN's "Crossfire" program — came the day after five Dallas police officers were shot dead by a sniper and in the same week in which two African Americans were killed by cops.
He recalled how as a son of an Army officer, his family moved from an integrated community to a segregated one in Georgia in 1960.
"It was still legally segregated, which meant the local sheriff and National Guard would impose, by force, the taking away of rights of Americans," he said.
"We've come a fair distance, now we have a black mayor of Atlanta, and have had a series of them in fact. We have John Lewis who went from marching on Selma to a Democratic whip in Congress. But we've stalled out on the cultural, economic, practical progress we needed."
That stall, he added, "creates the kind of alienation where it begins to become legitimate to think about, whether it's in songs or slogans or whatever, the shooting of policemen.
"If we were to continue in this direction of alienation on both sides, you could really be a very coarse and dangerous society in 10 or 15 years."