Midday On Culture: The Rhetoric Of Violence

"For every unarmed black man, woman or child killed by unrestrained police officers, there’s an intellectually impoverished response when black people get visibly upset about it: What about black-on-black crime?" Charles Ellison's essay in The Root and the post-riots increase in killings in Baltimore leads us to a discussion of the claim that black Americans are more concerned with police brutality than with the every-day loss of life that occurs in city neighborhoods. Our guests: Sheri Parks, associate dean for the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland at College Park and Charles Ellison, a contributing editor at The Root.