During his Tuesday broadcast of MSNBC’s “All In,” host Chris Hayes made a link between the recent racist video depicting members of the University of Oklahoma chapter of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and the Department of Justice investigation of allegations of civil rights abuses within the Ferguson, MO police department.
According to Hayes, the patterns of these two behaviors are similar but don’t address what’s happening “off the bus.”
“[T]he thing that got me thinking is, a) What’s been going on behind closed doors at Sigma Alpha Epsilon for all those many years, and b) It certainly occurs to me these 19-year-old guys going to the dance with their dates didn’t write that song on the way to the affair, did they?” Hayes said. “They probably didn’t write it right before they got on the bus. No, in fact, that song was taught to them somewhere somehow. It’s probably been along for a very long time. And it occurred to me as these two kids get expelled for saying these vile disgusting things to think about Ferguson, MO.”
“After the 106-page report came out basically chronicling a rogue agency of police that were using their position to humiliate and to extract revenue from the city’s black residents in violation of their constitutional rights in a systemic and unjust fashion that offensive to everything we think about self-determination liberty and rights that the people that lost their jobs in the report wasn’t the police chief,” he continued. “It wasn’t the people who engaged in that systemic violation of rights. It was the two police officers who had happened to send racist emails. That is what we nab. It’s the racist emails. You want to run a department that essentially uses the men in blue to enforce white supremacy? Well, then that might happen. But send a racist email about black people being lazy and being like dogs – well, then that gets you fired.”
“There’s something going on when we have these moments of universal condemnation and point and shame and name and say that’s racist, that ‘n-word,’ that thing happening on the bus,” Hayes added. “Let’s get rid of that because it lets everybody off the hook about what’s happening off the bus.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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