10 Outrageous Right-Wing Reactions to Police Killings This Year

http://www.alternet.org/10-outrageous-right-wing-reactions-police-killings-year




1. Geraldo Rivera criticizes LeBron James for wearing an #iCantBreathe shirt during pre-game warmups. During a segment on Hannity, Rivera, who notoriously criticized Trayvon Martin for wearing a hoodie, offered up some sparkling commentary on LeBron James' choice of shirt. "You know, I saw LeBron James on the night the Cleveland Caveliers pummeled the Brooklyn Nets and he had the shirt on, 'I Can't Breathe.' The shirt obviously referencing Eric Garner, the Staten Island man who was choked to death in that horrifying video we all saw. I wondered to myself, what if LeBron James instead had a shirt, 'Be a better father to your son. Raise your children.' Those difficult issues aren't being dealt with in the black community because they are so complex, they're so deep-rooted. They are so profoundly troubling that they don't want to try and it is a victimization mentality that says we can only motivate when we are the victims. It goes in keeping with everything that happens to the black community in the generations preceding. It's easy to demonstrate and be outraged when we are the victims: look what they are doing to us rather than what we are doing to ourselves. There is a kind of urban suicide that is happening here that has to be dealt with."

Perhaps the only thing that needs to be dealt with is Rivera's career.

2. Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani says the issue is black people killing each other; not white police officers brutalizing black communities. Giuliani appeared on a "Meet the Press" segment with Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson, who debunked everything the ex-mayor said, but not before Giuliani got, well, completely racist. “[Black-on-black crime] is the reason for the heavy police presence in the black community,” Giuliani claimed. “Why don’t you cut it down so that so many white police officers don’t have to be in black areas?….The white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other."

It's a good thing term limits killed Giuliani's career. New York City is so much better without him, although his legacy of strong-arm policing lives on.

3. Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley doesn't seem to think the cops in Ferguson, Mo., or elsewhere are an important issue poor black people have to deal with. Riley said in a column earlier this year that black-on-black crime is the main issue. "We now know that Michael Brown was much more of a menace than a martyr, but that won’t stop liberals from pushing an anti-police narrative that harms the black poor in the name of helping them. The black teen in Ferguson, Mo., robbed a store, attacked a white police officer and was shot dead while resisting arrest. That was the conclusion of a St. Louis County grand jury that brought no charges against the officer after considering all the physical evidence, along with eyewitness accounts from blacks in the vicinity of the confrontation. Not that any amount of evidence would have stopped the hooligans in Ferguson Monday night who were determined to use Brown’s death as a pretext for more bad behavior. Nor will evidence thwart liberals who are bent on making excuses for black criminality and pretending that police shootings are responsible for America’s high black body count."

4. No black right-wing racism denier has been more damaging to the fight against racism than Ward "Affirmative Action Killer" Connerly. When the University of California-Irvine offered students grief counseling after a grand jury declined to indict Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown, Connerly, who was a member of the University of California’s Board of Regents from 1993-2005, said the school was making a bad call.