By Caryn Altman
Despite the recent demonstrations in Missouri and New York against police brutality towards black men, the African American community actually loves the police, a best-selling author said during a speech at Towson University Wednesday.
“We think about what is going on in the streets and, honestly, it is not that black people are anti-police,” Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson said. “In fact, most black people love the police. They just want them to show up and know the right people to arrest. At the same time, people of color who are citizens deserve to be treated with respect and the protection of innocent until proven guilty.”
Speaking to more than 100 people at the West Village Common ballroom, Dyson touched on a broad range of topics that impact the African American community, including inequality in housing, affirmative action and the African American community’s view of President Obama.
He said that the 2008 housing crisis was a major set back for the black community.
“A lot of black people that did qualify for loans were given subprime loans,” he said. “The malignant persistence of the bigotry and bias in the financial markets meant that they were steering and redlining even in the housing market. Millions of black people wouldn’t enjoy the American dream. Ironically this was one of the powerful moments of spiking equal economic notion under the nation’s first black president.”
Dyson said that while many people believe that affirmative action only helps minorities, these policies have worked mostly to the benefit of white women.
“The majority of people that benefitted from affirmative action were white women, of course, and yet it had a colored perception in the broader American society,” he said. “Somehow folks were getting the leg up so that black kids were in class and the white students were looking at them like ‘didn’t you get in for affirmative action?’”
He went on to say that people will “lose perspective of the bigger issue at hand and blame others for the failure of students,” meaning that not all students receive the education that they deserve.
Dyson, who is currently writing a book about Obama, said the first black president is not getting a free ride from the African American community.
“A lot of black people [are] upset with Obama so they treat him with a level of disrespect,” Dyson said. “People think you are racist if you have problems with him. However, they are treating him like they treat anybody else.”
He added, “Obama isn’t the first black man that could have been president, but he is the first who understood what it took.”
Dyson was greeted with a round of applause for his speech and closed with one final thought.
“When I think about black progress, it’s a metaphor of progress for others,” he said. “It is a metaphor for the progress of African American cultures, but also to sources and sites of bigotry that have been used against us that we have turned around and internalized.”
This speech was part of a diversity guest speaker’s series in honor of Black History Month put on by the Towson University Center for Student Diversity.