If Jesse Jackson says so, it has to be true
Jesse Jackson doesn't think the death of the Oklahoma college baseball player Chris Lane is remotely similar to the murder of Trayvon Martin.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson said Thursday that conservatives are wrong to compare the Trayvon Martin case to the death of Chris Lane.
During an interview on MSNBC, Jackson was asked whether he thinks that "some on the right are making a false equivalency" between Martin and Lane, a young white baseball player allegedly killed Friday by three black teenagers.
"Yeah," he said. "They want to connect what happened in the Trayvon Martin case with these three young men on this foolish rampage killing this ballplayer."
Jackson said a better comparison was a case in Oklahoma last year when two white men shot five and killed three people in a black community. Jackson said conservatives "seem to have forgotten" about last year's slayings.
"That's really more of an equivalent," Jackson said. "But there are no winners in any of this sickness."
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On Thursday, Jackson denounced Lane's killings in far stronger terms than he did over Twitter on Wednesday, when he was mocked by some on the right for saying the actions of Lane's killers should be "frowned upon."
"I hope we all see that it is not right, that what these young men did was flat out wrong and sick," Jackson said. "And what happened there in June last year was wrong and sick, killing people for no cause."
Some on the right have sought to draw a connection between Lane and Martin, the Florida teen killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman in 2012, and argued that the muted reaction to Lane's case is racially motivated.
Actually, few people are saying the two cases are equivalent. Rather, the two cases prove the opposite - there is a disparity in media coverage when the victim is white and the perps are black. Jackson set up a strawman that any two year old could knock down. Of course there are vast differences between the Chris Lane and Trayvon Martin killings. It's how society - via the media - portrays the violence and hypes the racial angle. That's what critics are trying to point out.
Chris Lane is not Trayvon Martin. If he were, there would be wall to wall coverage of his death and the racial motivation of the shooters would be front and center.
So much for Jackson's "analysis."
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