Blow Doubles Down on Racism Charge: Doesn’t Matter Cop Was Black

Jeff Poor

In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Thursday’s “AC360,” New York Times op-ed columnist Charles Blow refused to back off allegations of racism involved in his son’s arrest at gunpoint by Yale campus police earlier this week.

Blow levied those allegations in a series of tweets and in a New York Times column.

However, it was revealed that the arresting officer was black.

Partial transcript as follows:

COOPER: Does the fact that the police officer involved was African-American? does that change at the equation in your mind in any way?

BLOW: It doesn’t for me,” the columnist replied, “because when we have the conversations with our kids, we don’t say, “Well, if you run into a white police officer, behave like this and this and this, and if you run into a black police officer, you don’t have to worry about that — do whatever you want to do, jam your hands into your pockets, jump around and talk back.” We talk about the police in general. And I am very happy that when he turned around and saw whoever it was with the gun he didn’t behave any differently. He saw a gun and an officer and he followed the very same script. You know, a bullet doesn’t know the color of the finger that pulls the trigger. It doesn’t care. Bullets don’t have emotions, they have directions. I think we as parents have to remember that, it’s not so clearly delineated in terms of who your kid might run into as an officer.

COOPER: Do you believe race played a role, even though the officer was African-American, do you believe race played a role in what happened to your son because there are some — you have come under criticism from some conservative sites. Some have even called it a race hoax because in your original article, you didn’t mention that the officer was African-American.

BLOW: Right. Because in my article — I’ve been writing about this for probably years now and I have almost stopped altogether mentioning race of officers, period.

COOPER: Has that become a conscious decision on your part?

BLOW: It had been a conscious decision on my part — I’ll tell you why, because it became more and more clear to me that it was more about culture of the police officers dealing with these young black men than individual officers dealing with these young black men. To me, it started building up like this is bigger than just them. I started to just, not like a crusade but my own comfort to say, I don’t need to mention these races.

(h/t Mediaite)

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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