In the middle of a Hannity panel whitesplaining about black crime, Geraldo Rivera decided to lecture LeBron James about what his shirt should have said instead of “I can’t breathe.” Rivera scolded, “There is a kind of urban suicide happening here that has to be dealt with.”
Unless you consider the half-Puerto Rican Rivera a person of color (despite his racial attacks on Trayvon Martin), the Hannity show panel was all white: Fox Business’ Dagen McDowell was another panelist and, perhaps to balance out the half-Puerto Rican element, we had Bernard McGuirk, of “nappy-headed ho” infamy.
Plus, Sean Hannity. He announced at the beginning of the segment, “We’ve had all these high-profile incidents but the 90% …of deaths and crime, it’s black-on-black crime.”
That prompted Hannity to play a lengthy clip of Blacks Behaving Badly. He insisted it was “only one example” and “I don’t want people to interpret it as characterizing any one community but it is a big problem. Let’s watch this one example.”
It just so happens that Hannity re-played a clip from “this one example” later in this one segment. He also played another example of an African American man lunging at police in a New York synagogue, causing the police to shoot and kill him in what was presented as a justified killing.
McDowell announced that the reason African Americans get (overly) concerned about police killings is because it’s “easier to go after the police officers” rather than have “the entire community …take responsibility for what’s happening.”
Rivera said he saw LeBron James wearing his “I can’t breathe” shirt when he was in New York, referencing Eric Garner’s choking death at the hands of the NYC police. And Rivera couldn’t help but think that James’ shirt should have said something different:
RIVERA: 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 are not being dealt with by the black community because they are so complex. They are so deep-rooted. They are really 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’s happened in the black community and 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 "Look what we are doing to ourselves." There is a kind of urban suicide happening here that has to be dealt with.
McGuirk had some words of white wisdom for black people, too:
MCGUIRK: These are inconvenient truths that they obviously don’t want to talk about. This is the honest conversation about race that Rudy Giuliani’s trying to have, that Charles Barkley was trying to have. He got slapped around a lot for it, unlike Bolshevik Bill de Blasio who cites this academia-inspired gobbledygook.
Unlike McGuirk, or anyone else on the panel as a matter of fact, de Blasio has an African American family and can speak from personal experience.
So who’s really talking gobbledygook?
Watch it below from last night's Hannity.
And seriously? Geraldo needs to stop trying to be black people’s fashion police. It’s becoming too easy a joke.