Black Lives Matter rhetoric on racism as dangerous as Donald Trump

KIRO Radio’s John Curley is sick of how easily people are throwing the word racist around.

“The word racist is like one of those rat-traps made out of glue,” he said “Once a person gets stuck in it, you can’t get out.”

The topic of racism and the difficulties of being black in America has been on the public’s radar for years, with a renewed emphasis following two police-involved shootings of black individuals last week, followed by the murder of five white officers in Dallas.

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Curley says people are too quick to flip over the racism card without any proof of hatred between ethnicities. He points to the  Hispanic officer in Minnesota who fatally shot a black man in his car as an example.

“Is he a racist? Have we determined racism?” Curley asked. “He’s Hispanic — can a Hispanic person hate a black guy enough to kill him? Or does race just exist between a white and a black guy?”

“That’s a dumb question, John,” responded co-host Tom Tangney.

“Well, the ‘No justice, no peace, all racist cops must go’ chants are dumb, too,” Curley said.

Tangney told Curley that the Black Lives Matter crowd is pointing out that race might be playing a factor in these deaths, not that all white cops are racist. But Curley believes the rhetoric goes too far to the extreme, just like presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump’s stance on Mexicans.

“These guys are as dangerous as the far-far right that believe the same crap that Donald Trump talk about,” Curley said. “It’s as dangerous as when Trump says, the Mexicans are coming and raping everybody… When Trump says that, though, people rise up and say prove the numbers on it. But when these people say, ‘Oh, we’ve got racist cops,’ nobody puts the numbers to them and says, ‘Actually, if you look at the numbers, the shooting and stats don’t support it. Just like the far-far-crazy right, this would be the far-far crazy left.”

Tangney countered that there are numbers that do support a lot of the activists’ claims.

“Blacks are 2.5-times more likely to be killed by cops than whites,” Tangney said. “Unarmed blacks are five times more likely to be killed by whites. There are stats in their favor.

“We all are looking at things through our own rose-colored glasses – white and black-colored glasses – but it’s definitely a different experience if you’re black than if you’re white,” Tangney added.

Curley says we need to focus on the facts and how to fix definable problems: better police training, how the police department talks to individuals, how this generation is non-compliant to authority. He says the racist element needs to be proven before shouted from the rooftops.

“Don’t inject race into it if there’s no element of racism,” he said. “Because once you do, then it creates an entire firestorm where everyone is suspecting – if he’s white or he’s black then all of a sudden we need to talk about that. Take that out of it and talk about policing. That’s a better conversation.”

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