New Yorker Writer Critiques Obama’s Ferguson Comments: ‘Not Everything Is Even’

Jelani Cobb, who has been covering the Ferguson case for the New Yorker, reiterated his critique of President Barack Obama’s comments on the Grand Jury decision not to indict Ferguson officer Darren Wilson, saying the president played too much into a false equivalency between acts of looting and violence in the town and the shooting of Michael Brown.

“The president spoke in a very even-handed way about this, as he tends to do about these matters,” Cobb said.

“But not everything is even. There’s not an even distribution of concern here. People became very upset about the prospect of property damage. But the people in the community were saying we are concerned not only about Michael Brown’s death but the context in which his death seemed almost, if not predictable, than not shocking. In that regard, we can’t make a property offense the equivalent of a person losing their life.”

“I’m not actually going to defend attacking someone’s business,” Cobb clarified, “but these two things are not equivalent.”

Watch the clip below, via ABC News:

[Image via screengrab]

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