January 8, 2015

I don't watch Fox News, but this was the lead story on The Young Turks last night. And when I heard it, I thought, did I hear that right? I couldn't quite believe it. The way she says it, as if it's a perfectly obvious thing -- wow. Talk about white privilege!

Fox News anchor and Supreme Court correspondent Shannon Bream reacted to a Paris terror attack by suggesting certain skin tones are more typical of "bad guys" than others.

On the January 7 edition of Fox News' Outnumbered, the panel of hosts discussed the terror attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo that left 12 dead. Co-host Kennedy Montgomery suggested profiling may not always be an effective prevention policy because "sometimes bad guys don't look like bad guys."

Bream echoed the sentiment and wondered whether the ability to identify the skin color of the assailants in Paris would have helped law enforcement in this case. Bream suggested profiling may not be effective in situations where criminals are wearing masks or where the tone of their skin doesn't "look like typical bad guys," apparently implying that certain skin tones should raise red flags for law enforcement:

BREAM: That's my question about these guys. If we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had ski masks on, do we even know what color they were, what the tone of their skin was? I mean, what if they didn't look like typical bad guys? As we define them when we think about terror groups.

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