In a now-private video obtained by Vice News, well-known pro-life advocate and speaker at this year’s Republican National Convention Abby Johnson said cops would be “smart” to racially profile her biracial son because “statistically, my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
“I recognize that I’m gonna have to have a different conversation with Jude than I do with my brown-haired little Irish, very, very pale-skinned, white sons, as they grow up,” she said of her adopted biracial son.
“Right now, Jude is an adorable, perpetually tan-looking little brown boy, but one day, he’s going to grow up and he’s going to be a tall, probably sort of large, intimidating-looking-maybe brown man. And my other boys are probably gonna look like nerdy white guys.”
While a police officer treating Jude more “violently” than her white sons would make her angry, Johnson said she would understand if cops are on “high alert” around him, as opposed to her white children. The Unplanned author pointed to disproportionate rates of African American men in prison as a reason why cops are “smart” to racially profile.
“Statistically, I look at our prison population and I see that there is a disproportionately high number of African American males in our prison population for crimes, particularly for violent crimes,” she said. “So statistically, when a police officer sees a brown man like my Jude walking down the road — as opposed to my white nerdy kids, my white nerdy men, walking down the road — because of the statistics that he knows in his head, that these police officers know in their head, they’re going to know that statistically my brown son is more likely to commit a violent offense over my white sons.”
“So the fact that in his head, he would be more careful around my brown son than my white son, that doesn’t actually make me angry,” Johnson added. “That makes that police officer smart, because of statistics.”
Statistically, Black men are more likely to be sentenced than their white counterparts and receive 20 percent longer sentences for similar crimes. Additionally, Johnson’s claim about high numbers of violent offenses is also untrue, according to FBI data. However, Johnson chooses to ignore these facts and instead blames disproportionate incarceration rates on “fatherless-ness… particularly in Black homes.”
“70 percent of these dads are walking out on their babies,” she claimed, which is a possible reference to a 2018 Centers for Disease Control study that found that almost 70 percent of non-Hispanic Black women who gave birth were unmarried. However, Vice notes, the study did not account for women who may be living with their partner but not married to them.
“The root [of these issues] is not bad cops. The root starts in the home,” she concludes.
Watch Johnson’s video in full below.