Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on Monday appeared on Fox News to defend his argument that civil rights activists were wasting their time fighting police abuses of power because he said that "black on black" violence was the real problem.
During a Sunday discussion about a possible grand jury indictment against the Ferguson police officer who killed unarmed teen Michael Brown, Giuliani had asked Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson why he was not also concerned with "the poor black child that is killed by another black child."
“First of all, most black people who commit crimes against other black people go to jail,” Dyson explained. “Number two, they are not sworn by the police department as an agent of the state to uphold the law. So in both cases, that’s a false equivalency that the mayor has drawn, which has exacerbated tensions that are deeply imbedded in American culture.”
As the debate became more heated, Giuliani declared that "white police officers won’t be there if you weren’t killing each other 70 to 75 percent of the time."
“Look at this,” Dyson shot back. “This is the defense mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir.”
On Monday, Giuliani repeated the same message to the hosts of Fox & Friends, but without the benefit of Dyson's counterpoint.
"These things happen and they are exceptions," the former mayor said of Brown's death. "This is like there are two [city] blocks. In one block, 93 percent of the accidents occur. In the other block, 3 percent of the accidents occur. And you spend 93 percent of your time trying to stop the accidents in the 3 percent block, and none of your time trying to stop the accidents in the 93 percent block."
"The danger to a black child is not a white police officer," he continued. "That's going to happen less than 1 percent of the time. The danger to a black child -- if it was my child -- the danger is another black, 93 percent of the time they're going to be killed by another black."
"Blacks are basically killing other blacks, and these people are spending millions and millions of dollars demonstrating. They have every right to do it. Why don't they spend an equal amount of time trying to figure out that horrendous crime problem that exists?"
As for Dyson and other civil rights activists, Giuliani called them "some kind of racial demagogue, who I consider a racist, which is what many of these people are, who make these things into, like, they are the rule."
(h/t: Media Matters)
