Talib Kweli: ‘Unfair’ to Michael Brown for Media to Make Ferguson About Looting and Rioting

Rapper Talib Kweli joined Roland Martin on his NewsOne Now radio show Friday and continued to share his criticisms of the way the media has been covering the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Kweli, who has been on the ground in Ferguson this week, expressed his frustrations over the way the media narrative has shifted from Michael Brown’s death to become a story about the “reaction” to what happened nearly two weeks ago.

“The reaction is a righteous, justifiable anger,” Kweli said, speaking of both the peaceful protests and violent riots, “and that became the story.” He said the media “ate up” that side of the story to the point where the “looting and the protests became the reason to pay attention to the story,” something he felt was “unfair to our struggle” and to Brown’s family.

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Kweli also responded to critics who have tried to shift the focus away from incidents like the police shooting of Michael Brown and towards a larger epidemic of “black on black crime.”

“We should talk about violence in Chicago more, we should talk about violence in our communities more, but these are issues of poverty. These are issues of white supremacy,” he said. “You don’t treat a disease by attacking the symptoms, you treat a disease by attacking the root.”

In this case, he said the “root cause” of black on black violence is “poverty, the prison-industrial complex and white supremacy,” not because black people are “more susceptible to crime.”

Listen to audio below, via NewsOne Now:

[Photo via Wikimedia Commons]

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