Radio host, comedian, and political analyst D.L. Hughley joined Chris Cuomo on CNN’s New Day to discuss race relations and what is next.
Watch as D.L. Hughley compares Rudy Giuliani’s points on the Black Lives Matter movement to taking marriage advice from Kim Kardashian below.
See full transcript from the interview below.
This evening Hughley, author of “Black Man, White House: An Oral History of the Obama Years,” will sit down with Megyn Kelly on Fox News Channel’s The Kelly File. He will speak with Kelly one-on-one on race relations and his new book.
D.L. Hughley keeps the conversation going daily on his afternoon drive radio show The D.L. Hughley Show. The show can be heard nationally weekdays 3-7pm ET and stream online at TheDLHughleyShow.com.
The D.L. Hughley Show is distributed by REACH Media Inc., a part of the Radio One family.
Full Transcript – D.L. Hughley on CNN’s New Day (July 13, 2016) –
CHRIS CUOMO: We heard the presidents yesterday, Bush and Obama. Obama said we need to find the character to unify. President Bush said we need to remember our loyalty to humanity. How do we do that? How do we bridge this divide? We have comedian and political commentator, DH Hughley. He has given some of the most powerful and emotional commentary on this situation to date. He’s going to weigh in next.
D.L. HUGHLEY: And I just do not understand. We love our children. We love our parents, our mothers, our fathers. They’re brutalized. And nobody says anything. It’s too much. It’s too much.
CHRIS CUOMO: Emotional words from DL Hughley the last time he was on New Day. They came after those two police shootings, back to back, in Baton Rouge and Minnesota. We want to talk with him again because the situation has grown. Radio talk show host, DL Hughley, author of Black Man, White House, is back with us.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Good to see you.
CHRIS CUOMO: DL, thank you for coming in.
D.L. HUGHLEY: I promise not to cry this morning.
CHRIS CUOMO: Well listen, let me tell you something. Very often vulnerability is strength. And to show you feel in a situation like this is very powerful. Very powerful.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Not at my house it wasn’t, but okay.
CHRIS CUOMO: Why? Why wasn’t it?
D.L. HUGHLEY: Well, it does make you feel a little bit, it was a bit, certainly something I didn’t intend. And even getting up this morning and being asked to speak on the, to me, ultimately, no person can encapsulate. You know, like one black man, we’re 33 million people, like one black man, we, we’re a race of people that got Barack Obama and Flava Fav. So I don’t think one guy can quite hit that note.
CHRIS CUOMO: Well, let’s talk about a more meaningful need for balance right now, which is in the dialogue there seems to be — I’m with the police.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: I respect the police.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: I believe in the police.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: Or there’s; these shootings are wrong. Black people are not policed the same way white people are, and it’s got to stop. Why can’t we see those as the same continuum of concern.
D.L. HUGHLEY: They’re not, they’re not binary, they’re not mutually exclusively. I think …
CHRIS CUOMO: But they’re being treated that way, that’s why I ask.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Well, well here’s the thing that’s interesting. I think that black people have always been brutalized by the police in this country to a greater or lesser degree even when nuclear families were together. Like before, the reasons have changed, before you could get killed because you looked at somebody’s eyes and you were deemed disrespectful. But there’s always been a need in this country to make us feel maligned and, and to kind of justify the reasons that people can brutalize us. To me they’re not mutually exclusive. I think that your biases and fear as a police offer, biases and fears should not be tantamount to me being able to kill them, or to be killed by them, or somebody getting angry and frustrated, as the fact of what happened in Dallas, is, is a license to kill police officers. I think that humanity, when people die, it’s a sad thing for everybody. But I think that you want people to be sad. I don’t care. I value human life whether it was a blue uniform and has black skin. I don’t think that that’s the same. The first thing that happens when a young black man is killed is people instantly go on and check his criminal records as if that justified what happened to him. When the, when the boy fell in there with the gorilla the first thing they did was check on that boy’s father’s criminal record. Tamir Rice, a 12 year old boy got killed, the first thing they did was check on his father’s criminal, thereby trying, thereby trying to malign him to justify what happened to him.
CHRIS CUOMO: And then what happens? Then you have a pendulum effect. So then you have the Mike Brown incident.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: That we all covered.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: And the officer winds up being acquitted.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Everybody winds up being acquitted.
CHRIS CUOMO: Well, that’s not true.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Well, the girl that killed by the police officer. That’s right. He got sentenced and still didn’t serve one day in jail.
CHRIS CUOMO: Look, justice is certainly not a perfect system. It’s supposed to be fairness under law, it doesn’t always work that way.
D.L. HUGHLEY: It hasn’t worked that way.
CHRIS CUOMO: But the idea that nobody goes to jail, that’s not true.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Here’s the thing, about 98% of the people do not. We have, I can give you a list of names where people have been killed nobody has been brought to account to it. And I think that that doesn’t happen. When you tell me all lives matter, if you show me a number of, of white kids, or urban, or non-black kids getting brutalized like that, I’d say the same thing, but nobody can give me that …
CHRIS CUOMO: There is, there is a danger in false parity.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: You’re right. There’s statistics going around now that, hey, did you know that more whites get shot by cops than blacks?
D.L. HUGHLEY: You know why?
CHRIS CUOMO: You don’t adjust for population and there are a lot of other factors that go into it as well. In fact I had one guy, I’ve been researching this like crazy, because I’m trying to understand how I can be of value here. It can’t stay this way.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: And I had a social scientist say to me, you know, this idea that blacks resist more than whites.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Right.
CHRIS CUOMO: He’s like, you know, I’m trying to put my hand on it, I don’t think that’s even true, because blacks have such an odd disposition when it comes to police. They feel that they have to acquiesce in a way that a lot of whites don’t. They feel they can have conversations and pressure.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Let me add something to that. Yes, more white people get shot by police than black people. About 120 more.
CHRIS CUOMO: Right.
D.L. HUGHLEY: But there are 120 million more white people.
CHRIS CUOMO: That’s right.
D.L. HUGHLEY: If, if you adjusted it for percentages.
CHRIS CUOMO: Sure, it’s not even close.
D.L. HUGHLEY: We are five times more likely to be shot.
CHRIS CUOMO: Right, five times more likely.
D.L. HUGHLEY: You know what happens? That racism and bigotry have great PR. People throw out statistics like that, that you, that you know aren’t true, but people will believe it because they want to. The, the fact is that black people are five times more likely to be shot than white people. Black on black crime. More white people commit crime than black people. It is true, even if you adjusted for population, more white people commit crime than black people. But when you say black on black crime that gives you the incentive to go out there and do something about it. It gives you a call to action. Now we have an immediate situation that has to be dealt with. And when we repeat those things it gives it, it gives it breath.
CHRIS CUOMO: You also have a situation where what happens in the immediate sense, often context gets lost. Why do you have more blacks coming into contact with police where it turns violent? So you start looking at the numbers. Well, where are these police?
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: Or what’s going on in those neighborhoods? Now, you can stop your analysis right there and say, there high crime, poor black areas, feel for the police, they have to do their job.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: But why are they high crime areas?
D.L. HUGHLEY: Right.
CHRIS CUOMO: Where is the education? Where is the oppor–this is complex, and I often feel that the reason that people don’t have an open mind is we don’t want to go there.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: We don’t want to go to the real reasons. Let’s just end it with this one guy and this one cop and lead the analysis. But do you think that’s the right way to do it?
D.L. HUGHLEY: Well, obviously it hasn’t, it hasn’t served them well. Like if you look at Tamir Rice, Tamir Rice was a 13 year old kid playing with a toy gun, right?
CHRIS CUOMO: Yeah.
D.L. HUGHLEY: The police officer that shot him was employed by an independent police department and fired because he was out of the academy because he was such a bad police officer they thought that no amount of training would ever make him a reasonable officer. Then they put that very officer, nine months later, in Cleveland, and he kills someone. And, and society, and we all know this, we all know this happened, and he’s let off? And it’s not his fault? You cannot tell me all lives matter when some are treated distinctly different. I could mourn for police officers that are slain, and I could mourn for two young black men who were slain. There is no, I, I don’t have a moral velamen in it.
CHRIS CUOMO: I think that All Lives Matter is a perversion of what makes Black Lives Matter special.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure, sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: There is an obvious inequity. Everybody knows that. The reasons for it need to be debated.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: How you fix it needs to be prayed for.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: But there’s an obvious parity. My question to you is, I want to leave on this with this, one; I want you to promise to continue this conversation. Two; I want you to give me your best sense of how can we get better from where we are?
D.L. HUGHLEY: It is, it is a simple – you know, everybody asks that question; do onto others as you would have them do onto you. I, I watched the movie, A Time To Kill, and at the end he made this great analysis. And he said, if she were white, he made that equivalent to her being white. People are treated differently. Biases, police officers have fears and biases. That is, there is no doubt about that, based on any number of things. But if your fears and biases get me killed and my anger and frustration get me killed, we’re going to act human. We are no less or more human. Every time you turn around somebody’s making a morale reason why somebody is slain in the streets, and it’s an abhorrent behavior. And it would be abhorrent if I said a young black man slaughtered five police officers, or whether you see a police officer slay five black men. When Rudy Giuliani says that Black Lives Matter are terrorists, Black Lives Matter – let me tell you something, I don’t think all black are all anything or all white people are all anything, but to be castigated with the same brush as they did Michael Johnson would be an equivalent to me telling you that all people think like Rudy Giuliani. And that would be deeply offensive. And to allow somebody to say that on air and to go unchallenged saying that on air, because a lot of people …
CHRIS CUOMO: Not here.
D.L. HUGHLEY: No, no. A lot of people want that narrative because it edifies their perspective.
CHRIS CUOMO: Well, when it comes from someone like Rudy Giuliani, do you think that – and I’ve been watching the Twitter war, people can go online and see it for themselves.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: But do you think that he as trying to make a more innocuous point, that he was trying to say have love of humanity?
D.L. HUGHLEY: I think there was nothing loving about that situation. I think he was a brutal mayor who had basically a reign of terror of black people in this country, and, and the city. To me, taking parenting advice from Rudy Giuliani is like Kim Kardashian giving me marriage advice. It is ridiculous. It is ridiculous when you have a person who has said some of the most heinous things that happened to black people in hist-in the history of this country, and to say something like that, every time somebody says something about injustice, they are the terrorists. MLK would be considered a terrorist. Gandhi was a terrorist. Mandela was a terrorist. And all he was trying to do was fight for legal, for justice. And to me, to have an all, when all white men tell black men how to act, that’s the most ridiculous thing in the world. Like he’ll tell you how you to — to tell black people, to speak a certain way and act a certain way is no different than telling a woman how to dress so she doesn’t get raped.
CHRIS CUOMO: Bush said yesterday we need to remember our loyalty to humanity.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: Obama said we have to have the character to find unity.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Sure.
CHRIS CUOMO: DL Hughley, I feel you’re doing both of those things.
D.L. HUGHLEY: Thank you.
CHRIS CUOMO: Thank you for being here to continue the conversation.
