After saying on her radio program today that President Obama has “pushed things so far back” in terms of race relations, the American Family Association’s Sandy Rios told a man who called in to challenge her statement that the media had made him an “angry black man” in its efforts to “whip the black community into a frenzy” over police shootings.
Rios played a clip from an interview Wicomoco County, Maryland, Sheriff Michael Lewis gave to Fox’s Sean Hannity about unrest in Baltimore, in which he said that race relations have “eroded tremendously” under the Obama administration and are the “worst” he’s ever seen.
Rios wholeheartedly agreed with Lewis, saying that President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder “have pushed things so far back” in terms of race relations. “I hate that,” she said. “I hate what it’s done to race relations. I hate that. It’s divisive. And that’s what the president’s all about, is dividing people by race, color, sex, it’s just amazing to me.”
Later in the program, a listener who identified himself as Charles from Columbus, Ohio, called in to challenge Rios on the point, citing the recent acquittal of a police officer in the shooting deaths of an unarmed black couple in Cleveland. “Unfortunately, sisters and brothers like yourselves and others just don’t get it as it pertains to basically to black America and the history of black America with regards to America,” he told Rios. “I get so discouraged when I hear you guys talk about the current situation with policing and black America.”
Rios told Charles that he was being duped by “people who want to whip the black community in a frenzy by misrepresenting facts” on police shootings, saying that he has to be careful with the facts just as the Right does in talking about Jade Helm 15 and other anti-Obama conspiracy theories (something that Rios herself does not exactly do).
She even compared Charles’ outrage over police shootings to the backlash she received over her comment connecting the recent Amtrak derailment to the conductor’s homosexuality
“You do understand, Charles, that there are people who want to whip the black community into a frenzy by misrepresenting facts?” she asked. “You know, I was just the object of this, I have just been — people have been whipped into a frenzy over statements that I made about the train conductor. And what they’re saying is, they take a lot of what I said and twist it, and then it goes like a house afire. So I know how this works. Maybe you don’t. But I tell you there are people that benefit from twisting the story ever so slightly to get you whipped into a rage.”
“Look, ABC doesn’t care about giving you the whole story, neither does CBS, because they want you to be an angry black man,” she said. “Do you understand that?”
