By David Edwards
Social activist Deray McKesson criticized the media over the weekend for the way they had handled a white biker shootout in Texas with “nuance,” but black rioters in Baltimore who did not kill anyone were not “humanized” in the same way.
In an interview on Sunday, McKesson explained to CNN host Brian Stelter than he had quit his job as a school administrator after Michael Brown was killed.
“The reason that I quit was that I want to figure out how to use my skills and talent to fight in this space because you just can’t kill people,” he said. “All the work that I did in education was important, but kids have to be alive to learn.”
McKesson slammed the media for what he called “a constant pathologizing of black bodies,” which gave the impression that “when black people assemble, it’s always criminal.”
“What you saw in St. Louis, the police were literally attacking protesters, and that wasn’t always the narrative that was put out by the mainstream media,” he noted. “What you saw in Baltimore sometimes, you saw people sort of focusing on the property damage and not actually people actually focusing on what caused the unrest in the first place.”
“So when I see broadcasts, news articles that present the police narrative as true,” McKesson added before being interrupted.
“But it is oftentimes true,” Stelter insisted.
“Is it true?” McKesson asked. “I don’t know if it was true with Mike Brown. Maybe we differ on what true means.”
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