Charlie Rangel: ‘This great country of ours has a cancer called racism’

Rep. Charlie Rangel, New York Democrat, said Friday that police are symbolic of broader, learned attitudes Americans have about race.

“As awkward as it is, we have to say that this great country of ours has a cancer called racism,” he said. “Until you admit it, there’s no way in the world to deal with it.”

“The police are only symbolic of attitudes that people have - they’re not born with it; they learn how to do it, and they treat people differently because of their color,” he said on CNN’s “New Day.” “You know, when people start to think - it hasn’t been that long ago, we’re picking cotton without any names of our own, without any culture, and 60 years ago there was a question as whether or not we had civil rights [or] we had voting.”

“I say that because we’ve come a good distance from where we were when we were born into this country,” he said.

Mr. Rangel’s comments came as protests continue over a grand jury’s declining to indict New York City police officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death over the summer of 43-year-old Eric Garner, an unarmed black man who had been stopped on Staten Island on suspicion of illegally selling cigarettes.

That decision came on the heels of a separate grand jury’s declining to pursue criminal charges against Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, who is black, in Ferguson, Mo. this summer.

“When God gives birth to these little kids, they haven’t the slightest clue as to who to hate and who to dislike,” Mr. Rangel said. “If you could put your feet or your kids’ feet into shoes that we have to walk because we are the kids of fallen slaves, I think as Americans you would say, ’thank God I’m born in America, thank God it’s time that we can change, and thank God we can get rid of this cancer we have.’”