At a Ferguson protest outside of the Los Angeles Police Department this past Tuesday, a young (white) lady who said she was a student at UCLA lambasted a black LAPD officer about … racism.
“As a person of color, are you ashamed to be part of such a corrupt system?…As a black man, have you ever experienced racism?” the woman asked.
The officer answered that he had grown up in Jackson, Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. “I know racism. I can spot it,” he said.
She was not satisfied. “Do you accept that there are covert types of racism?” she asked, citing an example of a woman clutching her purse tightly when he entered an elevator. “Racism is a structure of power,” she insisted. “You are a black man. You are kept down by your race, even if you won’t accept it.”
He threw the challenge back at her. “Think about it. There are people who don’t like me–they don’t know me–because of my uniform. Is that discrimination or not? Yes or no?”
“That’s a bias,” she said. “Job discrimination is different. I’m talking about your race. The color of your skin…You’re a black man. You’ll never reach the same pinnacle as a white man in this system, because you are black.” Others, gathered nearby, applauded loudly.
She went on to demand to know if the officer was “helping out his black community.”
When the officer replied that “it doesn’t matter what the race is,” demonstrators shouted “Yes it does!”
Because there’s nothing like being lectured to by college students about what it “means” to be African-American.
Here’s video of the encounter:
Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter
IMAGE: Floyd Brown/Flickr
Please join the conversation about our stories on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, MeWe, Rumble, Gab, Minds and Gettr.