Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the Democratic vice presidential nominee, slammed President Trump and Attorney General William Barr over comments denying systemic racism in the judicial system.
“I think that Donald Trump and Bill Barr are spending time in a different reality,” Harris said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “The reality of America today is what we have seen over generations, and frankly since our inception, which is, we do have two systems of justice in America.”
Harris’s comments came after Barr told CNN last Wednesday that the does not think there are two justice systems, and saying there is a “false narrative” around police shootings of Black men in America.
“I don’t think there are two justice systems,” Barr said on “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer.” “I think the narrative that the police are in some epidemic of shooting unarmed black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that’s based on race.”
And asked whether he thought systemic racism is a problem in the U.S. during his visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin last week, Trump said “you just keep getting back to the opposite subject.”
“We should talk about the kind of violence that we’ve seen in Portland [Oregon] and here [in Kenosha] and other places, it’s tremendous violence,” he added.
Harris said on Sunday that there is “no question” that the U.S. has seen an unacceptable amount of incidents of unarmed Black men being killed for generations.
“I don’t think that most reasonable people who are paying attention to the facts would dispute that there are racial disparities and a system that has engaged in racism in terms of how the laws have been enforced,” Harris said. “It does us no good to deny that. Let’s just deal with it. Let’s be honest. These might be difficult conversations for some, but they’re not difficult conversations for leaders, not for real leaders.”
Harris’s comments come amid nationwide demonstrations, with Black Lives Matter protesters rallying against racial injustice and police brutality, while clashing at times recently with counter protesters.
Protests erupted this summer, sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Protests were reignited in the last couple of weeks after the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha at the end of August.
–Updated at 10:30 a.m.