On this weekend’s broadcast of “Fox News Sunday,” Rev. Jesse Jackson and Dr. Ben Carson debated the civil unrest after Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.
Jackson became defensive when host Chris Wallace’s first question was why he had called the shooting a “state execution,” answering, “We need to have a sense of justice. All we do know about Michael Brown is really he was shot unarmed six times.”
“It seems to me that the police act as judge, jury, and executioner, and even on the worse scenario, if [Brown] hit [Wilson] on the face, does that require at a distance? Does that mean you shoot him six times? Four times at point-blank range? I don’t think so,” Jackson added.
Wallace asked Jackson about the the statistics Juan Williams pointed to on the panel earlier in the show, saying, “among black males between ages 15 and 34, and 91 percent of black murder victims are not killed by the police but are killed by other blacks.”
Jackson shot back, “Well, first of all, I wish Dr. Carson and I were on that white panel you just had because it does have a race dimension. We come by it from experience differently than your previous guests, number one. Number two, it seems to me that when blacks kill whites, which is rare, it’s swift justice. When it’s white on black, it’s slower. When it’s black and black, it’s drugs in, jobs out. Racial disparity and alienation and distrust are very combustible formulas, factors.”
The roundtable included Karl Rove, Bob Woodward, Laura Ingraham, and Juan Williams.
“First of all, Reverend Jackson, thank you for what you have done in the past, particularly during your days with Reverend Martin Luther King,” Carson said. “I appreciate it very much. I would have to say that we really are not on different sides of this issue. Maybe we come at it from different points of view, but I think we all want the same thing. We want people to move up in our environment, not to be satisfied and not to be dependent. And there are a lot of interconnecting parts that go with that.”
“We’re going to have to remove some of the issues that are depressing the economy so that we can create the kinds of jobs and the kinds of right situations so that people have the kinds of options that they need. We need to talk in the black community about the trillion dollars of resources that exist there. And how they need to learn how to turn over dollars in our own community before we send them out to develop wealth and how to reach back and pull others up. Some of the worn-out policies of the do-gooders have not helped the community,” Dr Carson added.
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