For someone who just said he doesn’t like to talk about race in the media, Charles Barkley sure is outspoken when it comes to chastising black communities.
The former basketball great sat down with CNN to discuss comments he made last week supporting the Ferguson grand jury decision not to indict the white officer who killed an unarmed black teenager. During the interview with a Philadelphia sports radio show, Barkley also called rioters “scumbags.”
Tuesday was no different. The NBA Hall of Famer said that white cops weren’t out to shoot black people because of racism, suggesting black people “cry racial profiling” when cops come into these communities to “clean up the neighborhood.”
“We as black people, we have a lot of crooks. We can’t just wait until something like (the Brown shooting) happens. We have to look at ourselves in the mirror,” he said of people in black communities. “There is a reason that they racially profile us in the way they do. Sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it is right.”
During his interview with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin, Barkley also touched on the case of Eric Garner, the 43-year-old father who was killed by NYPD officers in an illegal chokehold.
‘I don’t think they were trying to kill Mr. Garner,’ Barkley told Baldwin. ‘He was a big man and they tried to get him down.’
Barkley said the media tend to only bring up race when situations like these emerge, and then it’s the same group of national civil rights figures–and not members of the specific community–who voice outrage.
‘[The] same sad sack of black characters,’ he called them. ‘We need someone in St. Louis to stand up and say “hey let’s handle this situation.”‘
Interestingly, he forgot to acknowledge the community of young leaders in Ferguson powering the movement to foster better policing, not no policing at all.
Watch Barkley’s interview above.
SOURCE: CNN, Daily Mail | VIDEO SOURCE: CNN
