Buttigieg: ‘Our Health Care System Is Burdened by Racism’

EXCERPT:

BUTTIGIEG: “Now, I’m running for president as mayor of an American city, admittedly not a traditional move, but I am doing it because we need national politics to rediscover its local basis, to recognize that the toughest local issues both cause and reflect our most urgent national issues. We are living in shadows cast through time and across the country, and policing is only part of the story. Yes, the uniform is burdened by racism, but it goes far beyond that. Our healthcare system is burdened by racism if black women are dying three times as often from maternal complications as white women, if, as we just heard that here in Chicago there’s an enormous disparity in life expectancy from neighborhood — from one neighborhood to another. We know that our housing is burdened by racism, the result of intentional policies, local and national, that segregated our neighborhoods by race, and when they could no longer be enforced by law, they were enforced by bureaucracy and by intimidation. Our schools are burdened by racism, not just in the history that led to Brown V. Board, but in the fact that in the years since, our schools remained segregated.”