Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani made some provocative statements on race and the media during his appearance on CBS' Face the Nation Sunday, including calling the Black Lives Matter movement "inherently racist."
After voicing his sympathy for the victims of the shootings in Louisiana, Minnesota, and Dallas over the past week, Giuliani discussed the need for understanding between the black and white communities, as well as the lack of attention given to black-on-black crime compared to instances of police shooting black men:
Whites have to realize that African-American men have a fear and boys have a fear of being confronted by the police because of some of these incidents. Some people may consider it rational. Some people may consider it irrational. But it's a reality. It exists.
And there's a second reality in the black community. And the second reality in the black community is, there's too much violence in the black community. So a black will die 1 percent or less at the hands of the police and 99 percent of the hands of a civilian, most often another black.
...when there are 60 shootings in Chicago over the 4th of July [...] and Black Lives Matter is nonexistent, and then there's one police murder of very questionable circumstances and we hear from Black Lives Matter, we wonder, do black lives matter or only the very few black lives that are killed by white policemen.
Giuliani went on to say black children should be taught "to be respectful to the police," concluding with his condemnation of the phrase "black lives matter":
...when you say black lives matter, that's inherently racist. Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter. That's anti-American and it's racist. Of course black lives matter, and they matter greatly, but when you focus in on one percent of less than 1 percent of the murder that's going on in America, and you make it a national thing and all of you in the media make it much bigger than the black kid who's getting killed in Chicago every 14 hours, you create a disproportion. The police understand it and it puts a target on their back. Every cop in America will tell you that if you ask him.
Check out Giuliani's entire Face the Nation interview below: