Sunday on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend,” Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz responded to Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) accusing him of being a “racist.”
Waters’ claim was based on Dershowitz suggesting President Donald Trump will have a disadvantage given the political makeup of the locality where a grand jury is empaneled is solidly Democrat, and the “racial composition” was not favorable to Trump.
Dershowitz said Waters’ race did not give her a license to declare people racist and Dershowitz invoked the 1990s O.J. Simpson case, one of which that he was a part.
“Look, Maxine Waters should know better and does know better,” Dershowitz said. “She knows that every experienced lawyer, white, black, Asian, Latino, knows that when you’re selecting a jury, factors like ethnicity, race, political affiliation matter. If I had said that race didn’t matter, she would have called me a racist. She throws around the term so loosely and so inappropriately, and it weakens her credibility because calling everybody a racist by calling me a racist when she calls real racists ‘racists,’ nobody is going to believe her. Would she have called Johnnie Cochran a racist when he obviously understood that the racial composition of the jury in the O.J. Simpson case mattered a great deal?”
“Race matters,” he continued. “And Maxine Waters ought to know that and being ashamed of herself. You know, being black doesn’t give you a license to call people racist any more than being Jewish gives you license to call people antisemitic. So, she ought to understand that every criminal defense lawyer knows that race matters, ethnicity matters, political affiliation matters. We’re not talking about computers here. We’re talking about real jurors making real decisions and jurors make decisions based on their life experience and race and ethnicity is part of everyone’s life experience and Maxine Waters more than anyone ought to know that. She tossed it around and targeted me for no good reason. She ought to be ashamed of herself.”
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