Watch Gayle King’s Emotional Reaction to Racist Incident in Central Park: Feels Like ‘Open Season’ on Black Men
Gayle King delivered an emotional reaction on Tuesday’s CBS This Morning after the show played the racially charged viral video of a white woman calling the police and falsely claiming a black man was threatening her life.
“Once again, I say thank goodness that there’s video tape,” she said to her co-hosts. “You know, I think as a daughter of a black man and a mother of a black man, this is really too much for me today. I’m still rattled by the last story.”
King was also upset that the woman in the video, Amy Cooper, was strangling her dog as she yelled at Christian Cooper, the man filming her as he asked her to put her dog on a leash — which is required in Central Park’s Ramble.
King then compared the incident to another racially charged case in Minneapolis, where a black man died after a police officer pinned him to the ground and kneeled on his neck while he ignored the man begging him to stop because he couldn’t breathe.
“I am speechless. I am really, really speechless about what we’re seeing on television this morning,” she added. “It feels to me like open season and that it is just not, sometimes it’s not a safe place to be in this country for black men.”
Amy Cooper has since apologized in a statement to CNN, adding, “I think I was just scared. When you’re alone in the Ramble, you don’t know what’s happening. It’s not excusable, it’s not defensible.”
Despite the apology and her claims that she is not racist, her employer Franklin Templeton has placed Cooper on administrative leave, saying they “do not condone racism of any kind:”
In response to an incident involving an employee on May 25th, Franklin Templeton issued the following statement. pic.twitter.com/8f2lMwK0r5
— Franklin Templeton (@FTI_US) May 26, 2020
Watch above, via CBS.
