Vice President Mike Pence made a rare appearance on the Senate floor to preside over General Brown’s confirmation, which was approved by a vote of 98 to 0, and President Trump celebrated it on Twitter. It came a week after General Brown released a video in which he spoke in starkly personal terms about his experience as a black man in America, his unequal treatment in the armed forces and the protests that have gripped the country after the killing of George Floyd in an encounter with Minneapolis police officers.
“I’m thinking about how full I am with emotion not just for George Floyd, but the many African-Americans that have suffered the same fate as George Floyd,” General Brown said in the video, an unusually public statement by a high-ranking military leader about a sensitive and politically charged issue.
“I’m thinking about protests in my country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, the equality expressed in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that I have sworn my adult life to support and defend. I’m thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn’t always sing of liberty and equality.”
The vote was a rare moment of unanimity in a deeply divided Senate, where lawmakers in both parties spent the day struggling to craft a response to the civic unrest that General Brown addressed. Mr. Pence called the confirmation “historic.”
Mr. Trump took to Twitter before the vote to announce that it had already happened, and praised the Senate for approving “my decision” to name General Brown.
“A historic day for America!” Mr. Trump wrote, calling the general “a Patriot and Great Leader!”
In the video released last week, General Brown described his life as straddling “two worlds,” between the American ideals that he has defended with his life and his other reality as a black man subject to discrimination in his own country.
As he rose through the ranks in the Air Force, General Brown said, he was “often the only African-American in my squadron” and as a senior officer, “the only African-American in the room.”
He recalled having his credentials questioned, when those of white pilots were not. He said he frequently felt pressure to perform without error to prove wrong those supervisors who expected less from him than from his white counterparts.
Source :New York Times
Tags
Politics