Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani touched of a tense debate with Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson when he suggested that the media was devoting too much attention to the Michael Brown killing.
Giuliani said that incidents of white police officers shooting black men is a “significant exception” to the rule.
“I find it very disappointing that you’re not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks in America [who are murdered] are killed by other blacks,” the former Republican presidential candidate said on Meet the Press.
Dyson countered that Giuliani was making a “false equivalency,” saying that “black people who kill black people go to jail; white people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.”
“It is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community,” Giuliani countered. “So why don’t you cut it down so that so many white police forces don’t have to be in black areas?”
As NBC’s Chuck Todd shut down the conversation, Dyson told Giuliani that his arguments revealed “the defensive mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind.”
Before ending the segment, Todd turned to Anthony Gray, the attorney for Brown’s family, and asked if he was “confident” that protests in Ferguson would remain peaceful.
“I’m not” Gray replied. “I’m hopeful that there will be peace in Ferguson and I’m prayerful that peace will reign.”
Reactions to Giuliani's statements have been varied, from extremely supportive to extremely negative. What do you, denizens of NSG, think of Giuliani's statement?
I wholeheartedly agree with him. The media blows up when a black person is killed by a non-black person, but they ignore the major problem of black-on-black crime, a tragedy of immense proportions.