Abby Johnson, a speaker on anti-abortion policy at the Republican National Convention, recently defended racial profiling as a statically sound and smart policing technique.
In the wake of the protests kicked off by the killing of George Floyd, Johnson defended the controversial police tactic, even using her own African-America son as a point of her argument.
“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 on her YouTube channel.
Johnson added: “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.”
Johnson, a former employee of Planned Parenthood, explained that due to statistics of America’s prison population, racial profiling seems like a logical choice for police officers who encounter her adopted son.
“[S]tatistically, 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 [prison population] 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,” Johnson went on.
She has since changed availability setting on her video making it private after it received wide attention and backlash. Critics pointed to what they see as logical fallacies as well as an uninformed take on African-American men in American prisons.
Johnson left Planned Parenthood more than a decade ago but has dedicated her time to fighting the work of her former employers. The Texan even inspired an anti-abortion film, Unplanned, which was a moderate success.
