Truth-telling about black crime statistics probably never goes well in a classroom, but when it’s presented via rap – by an old white guy – it’s probably going to go a lot worse.
Case in point: Students at UC Berkeley this week held a protest against a professor who recently told his class the Black Lives Matter movement “needed to stop scapegoating the cops” and shared statistics to argue black-on-black crime is the real harm facing the black community.
Saying he was inspired by the campus Black Lives Matter conversation, Professor Steven Segal made his argument not only as part of a lecture to his graduate-level social work class, but also delivered some of his comments via a rap he wrote.
The professor at UC Berkeley – the birthplace of the free speech movement – has since been accused of racism and of creating a “toxic climate for people of color in the classroom,” and a #BlackLivesMatter sit-in demonstration against the longtime scholar was held Tuesday.