Speaking on Tuesday night as the keynote speaker at the the Ruby Diamond Concert Hall to honor Martin Luther King, BET News host and CNN political contributor Marc Lamont Hill joked about the supposed racism he experienced at Fox News between 2007 to 2009.
Hill, who earlier this week referred to blacks meeting with Donald Trump as “mediocre Negroes,” was attempting to rally leftists to unite when he waxed eloquent about the alleged racism at Fox news, and how conservatives found a way to unite:
He began, “We have to understand the interconnectiveness of our struggle. I used to work at Fox News. I was the visiting team. Nevertheless, I would be on TV – on Fox & Friends at 6 a.m. I’d be back on at 9 a.m. and noon and 10 p.m. Before, I would do O’Reilly at 8. Over the course of the day, I would realize they’re giving me the same arguments, same talking points, same fake statistics: ‘105 percent of black people are on welfare.’”
Lamont Hill continued:
It took me like a year to figure this out because they were having meetings. Every week they would meet on the fifth floor at 11 o’clock on Monday. I was never invited to the meeting. They would send me to the fourth floor. “No, seriously Marc – the fourth floor. There are bagels down there, pastries. You’ll love it.” I knew they were haelthy. Racist pastries are. I don’t know what they put in them – teardrops of poor people, I don’t know, Whatever it is, it’s good.
Then Lamont Hill issued his pitch for leftist unity:
But what was fascinating about the meeting was who was in it. You had the evangelical Christians who had a very particular agenda, who would be meeting with Second Amendment advocates, who didn’t necessary agree with the Second Amendment Christian fundamentalists. But they had a common vision and they engaged one another, and there were home-schoolers; they just wanted to teach their kids at home. And they were meeting with these same folk . . . there were pro-lifers in the room who didn’t necessarily care about free-market fundamentalism, but there these free-market fundamentalist in the room who had an opinion that might be different from the war hawks. Not usually, but the point is everybody had their own ideological stance and they understood that they would be better connected than separate. But so many of us have our movements and silos and separate spaces – “We’re doing my way over here and you’re doing your way over there,” and a consequence of us not coming together, we don’t have any collective power and that’s important we must work together.