Vice President Joe Biden responded Monday to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement by saying the movement is not representative of the whole black community.
Biden was asked on CNN to offer a response to Giuliani’s criticisms after meeting with law enforcement officials on Monday. While discussing the fatal police shootings of two black men last week in Louisiana and Minnesota, the former mayor had said the Black Lives Matter movement was “inherently racist” and black parents should teach their children to be “respectful to the police.”
Noting that President Barack Obama has criticized the movement before, Biden said some involved in the movement have criticized police in their chants. But he said those individuals were not representative of the rest of the movement.
“That’s not the community—that group, that element of Black Lives Matter, doesn’t speak for all of Black Lives Matter and does not, does not speak for those folks in the black community both middle class and poor who know they are more likely to be pulled over than the Caucasian guy,” Biden said.
The Vice President went on to call Giuliani’s statement “very broad” and to emphasize that the loosely organized Black Lives Matter movement encompasses people who both do and don’t want to “talk and have dialogue.”
“But to make it sound like it’s the NAACP or a major African-American organization, it is an umbrella of all kinds of people who feel like there is discrimination that exists in some police departments, in some neighborhoods and they want to talk about it, they want to deal with it,” Biden said.
