"The president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, speaks with Bill Whitaker"
on 60 minutes and it was fantastic. (don't forget to watch the "overtime" segments -- they are wonderful too)
"Why George Floyd's killing is a tipping point and how America can move forward"
Bill Whitaker: Why was this incident such a spark?
Sherrilyn Ifill: I've been doing this work for a very long time. And I've seen a lot of terrible videos. And this one actually struck me differently also.
Bill Whitaker: What was different about it?
Sherrilyn Ifill: It was long. It was long. And-- to see someone's life being taken from them with that kind of excruciating deliberation. The officer looking out at us like that.
Bill Whitaker: Looks at the camera, knows he's being recorded and doesn't seem to care.
Sherrilyn Ifill: That's important. Because it was believed and said by many that now that we have the videos things would be different. And so I think one of the reasons why the George Floyd video set us off so much was the realization that it's not different. We've-- we've seen the videos. And the videos seem not to make a difference. And that's why that officer could look like that. He wasn't afraid of being videotaped. He wasn't trying to hide what he was doing.
snip
Sherrilyn Ifill: This is 2020. But you know what happens when you don't deal with things that you should've dealt with in the past is that you keep reliving the past. We keep saying, "This is 2020, how can this be happening?" People are so shocked. It can be happening because we haven't dealt with this. And so we'll constantly feel like we're being thrown back in time. When you saw those men in a truck chasing Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and taking what I've been calling a hunt video 'cause that's what it looked like, that looked like something from another century.
Ifill is a former board member of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. She told us she believes deeply in the law, and the U.S. Constitution, which she sees as an incomplete document written by 18th century revolutionary idealists - many of whom held slaves.
Sherrilyn Ifill: Yeah, they didn't get the job done, you know. They left-- this work for the rest of us to do.
Bill Whitaker: To make America live up to its ideals?
Sherrilyn Ifill: Well, at the very least. And we should be creating new ideals. You know, the Constitution doesn't have to just be that static document. We've amended it many times. We amended it to give women the right to vote. We amended it to extend the vote to 18-year-olds. We always have the possibility of improving the republic. But the p-- the people have to have the will to do it. And the consequences of not doing the work are what we've been seeing. So for anyone whose lamenting what we've been seeing over the last two weeks, ask them how much they have worked to improve this country.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/naacp-sherrilyn-ifill-george-floyd-donald-trump-response-60-minutes-2020-06-07/
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