The beating death of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers has brought out a bevy of opinions on the matter, and Roland Martin took issue with Bill Maher’s take.
During Real Time with Bill Maher last week, the HBO host said people’s preoccupation with race has dominated the thinking in too many cases. Martin strongly disagreed.
“You can always count, these days, on Bill Maher saying some pretty stupid stuff,” Martin said. “On his Friday show, they had some conversation about the Tyre Nichols case and the video dropped. He had former Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH) on his show, and if you wanna see how two white men react to this, and how their commentary is utterly ridiculous, watch this.”
Martin then played a clip of Maher saying “America’s culture of violence does go deeper than race” after mentioning two Asians were murdered by an Asian shooter in California and Tyre Nichols was beaten by five Black Memphis police officers. Ryan added that the conversation should be about mental health, guns, and cops, adding that police officers are acting out of stress rather than hatred.
“Here’s my problem with this: ‘There’s a preoccupation with race’. He wants to act like race doesn’t matter. Is race the only thing? No. The reason we talk about the race aspect is because it is real. Race doesn’t apply to everything, but it applies to a lot of things.
“Bill wants to act like ‘Oh, there’s this preoccupation with it. Asians killing Asians and Black cops killing someone that’s Black’. Bill, if you look at what the FBI Director said, the greatest threat to America is White domestic terrorism. He didn’t say terrorism in general. He said White domestic terrorism.”
Maher’s comments came during his Overtime segment, which will begin airing as a quasi-postgame show on CNN Friday evenings at 11:30 PM ET beginning Friday, February 3rd.
