Thursday on CNN’s “Cuomo Primetime,” comedian D.L. Hughley said “white men” did not get to decide what racism was during a discussion of the state of race relations in the era of President Donald Trump.
Hughley said, “I think now we have a situation where we don’t have — even truth is suffering. There can’t be a moral equivalence, either it’s wrong to be hateful and to promote violence and apathy and to be angry and to believe in the supremacy of one race over another, or it’s not. And I think now we have people quibbling about it. ‘Well, they’re just as bad as those guys, and these are just as bad.’ So if somebody oppresses me and I fight back, then I’m just as bad as the guy who was determined to take all my rights away? That’s where we are in America right now.”
He continued, “I believe the president is a wanton racist, and I believe that America is not uncomfortable with it,” the comedian said. “When you tell me 89 percent of Republicans support him no matter what he does, I’ll say this. I can’t say all his supporters are racist, but I can say, for them, being a racist is not a disqualifier.”
He added, “White men don’t get to decide what racism is. White people don’t get to decide what racism is. They were so bad at judging it every time it happened. They were bad at judging it during slavery. They were bad at judging it during Jim Crow. White people don’t get to play this game. You don’t get to decide what the rules are here. The bottom line is this, we have watched children he put in cages. And the very scriptures that they quoted to put black men in chains, they used to put immigrants in cages. Either it’s wrong or it isn’t. Either we are in America where everybody is same or it isn’t.”
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