While you were in church, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton went on the road taking Black America to task about this so-called “Black Lives Matter” movement. Of course, they used misleading statistics and racist rhetoric to do it. Still, to those Whites looking for cover, it was effective.
Giuliani, whose own children have been charged with shoplifting and reportedly despise him, had this advice for Black parents:
“If you want to deal with this on the Black side, you’ve got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you’ve got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police, .the real danger to them — 99 out of 100 times — is other Black kids who are going to kill them.”
He went on to say, Black parents should warn their sons to “be very careful of those kids in the neighborhood and don’t get involved with them because, son, there’s a 99 percent chance they’re going to kill you — not the police!”
“Face the Nation” host John Dickerson looked shell-shocked as he attempted to wrestle control back from Giuliani, who had hijacked the show. None of the three network talk-show hosts attempted to challenge Giuliani on his wholly false and destructive narrative. While the FBI’s 2014 homicide data suggests Black victims are killed by other Blacks 90 percent of the time, it also notes that white-on-white homicides are at 82 percent. What is really at play is neighbor-on-neighbor killings rather than an intraracial homicide epidemic. Thanks to structural and institutional racism, Black Americans are concentrated in high poverty areas, where there is a higher incidence of crime and killings.
Wesley Lowery, a Black Washington Post reporter and “Face the Nation” guest, did counter Giuliani’s attempt to downplay police killings of Black men. “Once a week an officer is killed — three times a day a police officer takes the life of a citizen — a criminal killing someone is not the same as the state killing someone.”
NYPD Chief Bratton was dismissive of Black Americans’ fear of police. His positions were buffered by the presence of Black Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson. (My grandmother doesn’t know Johnson, but I have requested that she add him to her prayer list.)
Secretary Johnson has a very difficult job. While his words Sunday provided little comfort or support for the Black condition, he did provide us with a lesson in self-control.
Following Secretary Johnson’s hesitant admission of having given his son “The Talk,” Bratton condescended, “I’ve had conversations with my son [too].”
Secretary Johnson responded with silence, but fortunately, Michael Eric Dyson was able to rebuke Bratton during the “Meet the Press” roundtable discussion:
“[Bratton] wanted to draw a false equivalence between talking to his son and Jeh Johnson speaking to his son. … Jeh Johnson, unfortunately, hesitant to weigh in and I understand. Chief Bratton, more than happy to do so. There’s not an equivalence between Chief Bratton speaking to his son because his son is not most likely to be brutalized by police authority or the misapplication of the law to vulnerable populations,” said Dyson.
Giuliani and Bratton should be quite pleased with themselves. The only person who could possibly be more so is Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president and CEO of the National Rifle Association of America. Whatever the NRA pays him, it is not enough. He is like the Joker casting spells on an entire country while the rest of the world looks on in wonder as hardly a word is mentioned about gun control.
