Rudy Giuliani went on TV to call Black Lives Matter "inherently racist," to say that black youths face a greater threat from other black kids than from the police, and to claim that black families should teach their children "the real danger" of crime in their own community.
The former New York mayor waded into controversial territory during Sunday's appearance on CBS' Face the Nation to discuss the caught-on-video shooting deaths of black men at the hands of police officers in New Orleans and Minnesota, as well as the deaths of five police officers during related protests in Dallas.
"A black will die one percent or less at the hands of the police, and 99 percent at the hands of a civilian, most often another black," Giuliani said, downplaying and sidestepping the issue of police shootings that sparked the Black Lives Movement. "If you want to deal with this on the black side, you've got to teach your children to be respectful to the police, and you've got to teach your children that the real danger to them is not the police."
Giuliani also said that saying "black lives matter" is racist and "anti-American," and that the movement "puts a target" on police officers' backs because protesters "sing rap songs about killing police officers" and they "talk about killing police officers" and "yell it out at their rallies and the police officers hear it."
"When you say black lives matter, that's inherently racist. White lives matter, Asian lives matter, Hispanic lives matter," he said. "Of course black lives matter, and they matter greatly. But when you focus in on one percent, of less than one percent, of the murder that's going on in America, an you make it a national thing ... much bigger than the black kid that's getting killed in Chicago every 14 hours, you create a disproportion."
While Giuliani did say that solutions need to come from police and the white community as well, he spent much less time actually talking about those solutions, saying simply that police departments need a "zero tolerance policy" on "disrespect" toward the people they serve.
