Melissa Harris-Perry is known for being the tell-it-like-it-is voice on MSNBC, but maybe she kept it too real during her recently speech at The Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture at Cornell University.
“I hope [Martin] tried to stay alive. I hope he knew that he lived in a state with a ‘Stand Your Ground’ law. And I hope he whooped the shit out of George Zimmerman,” she said. “And it’s not disreputable because he encountered a stranger who was prepared to kill him, and you know how I know? Because he killed him.”
Harris-Perry’s speech, titled, “We Can’t Breathe: The Continuing Consequences of Inequality,” was posted on the school’s online publication, the Cornell Review, but was not received well by the CU community. Many comments of the newspaper’s blog critiqued Harris-Perry’s speech as “an hour-long comedy routine” and even harsher, “an embarrassment for Cornell.”
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