Former President George W. Bush released a statement Tuesday about the police killing of George Floyd but emphasized it wasn’t his place to say how the country should handle its systemic racism problem.
Instead, he said, it was time for Americans to recognize “the repeated violation” of the rights of Black Americans who didn’t get “an urgent and adequate response from American institutions” in a statement posted on the George W. Bush Presidential Center website.
Bush is the third president — after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — to speak out about Floyd, 46, a Black man who died last week after a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed on the ground.
But then Bush, who The New York Times noted never made any public statements against police brutality during his two terms in office, then said that Floyd’s death ― one of “a long series of similar tragedies” — raises the long-overdue question of how does America end its systemic racism:
“The only way to see ourselves in a true light is to listen to the voices of so many who are hurting and grieving.
Although Bush never called out President Donald Trump’s fiery rhetoric, he did concede that “many doubt the justice of our country, and with good reason.
