i didn t say the n word or anything like that, because that s not in my vocabulary. principal and founder of tnt academy, nancy gordeuk, defending remarks she made at a graduation ceremony friday. joining me now to discuss those remarks and what it means to say i m not a racist, tim wise, and cristina greer, professor of political science at fordham university. i m going to play devil s advocate for a second. sure. so, we live in the era of the omni present cell phone video. and everyone s worst moment is captured, right? so those worst moments can be all kinds of things we see posted on our facebook page. this was a bad moment for her. something really ugly was said. but, you know, it s one bad moment. why are we all ganging up on her? as the principal of a high school that serves predominantly african-american students and it s their graduation. that is the moment that you have chosen the devil to speak through you and also, which
political science at fordham university. let me start with you. i m going to play devil s advocate for a second. sure. you know we live in the era of the omnipresent cell phone video. and everyone s worst moment is captured, right? so those worst moments can be all kinds of things we see posted on our facebook page. this was a bad moment for her. something really ugly was said. but, you know, it s one bad moment. why are we all ganging up on her? as the principal of a high school that serves predominantly african-american students and it s their graduation. that is the moment that you have chosen the devil to speak through you and also, which story is it, right? is it that the devil sort of took hold of you and said all these sort of harsh things, or she also argues she didn t say anything wrong, right? at least she didn t say the n word. if it s not in your vocabulary, you clearly know about it. right? all racists start with i m not a racist. right, right. that s just
haiti earthquakes and it is not condental. algeria was spending lobbying the state department because of human rights in algerria and the concern back in 2008 and set up guidelines was the appearance of conflict of special and now you see, there was a reality of a conflict of interest. let me play devil s advocate for a second and say what supporters of the former secretary of state and foundation are saying. look, it is an organization that tries to do good. we try to take care of children and education and quite you know greenhouse gas emissions around the world. and so if we are taking money for good causes. you know what is the harm? that s the argument that mrs. clinton and supporters of the foundation will make.
and raised red flags. the first thing i realized is it s a single source story. there are other people that talk in the story but jackie s account is the only one. there are a number of things you see in the story. an example, recently she claims to have been hit in the face with a bottle, gave her a black eye, it was in public, there s no one to corroborate that, no medical evidence, no police reports. and it doesn t mean that something this horrific can happen. it can. but there was a mounting sense that i got when reading it that with just one source, you really, as journalists, we have to check this stuff out. as we heard, it affects the fraternity, it affects policy that is being made. and a lot of people s lives will be affected by this, by these claims. right, but if i can play devil s advocate for a second, the lawyer s statement, the lawyer who represents the fraternity, his statement is very specific, he denies sexual assault as part of the
prosecutor appointed by governor cuomo. he was asked to do that. he didn t do that. yes, and he didn t do it. he doesn t do it because it s a political decision. and we ve got to get beyond putting cameras on the police officers, which creates a whole 1984 issue. so bold systemic change looks like an institutionalized procedure by which cases such as these move into a channel other than the normal channel of prosecution? no, what we have to do is we have to create a system that makes sense, that s transparent and that we can trust. as we ve all pointed out, there s a built-in conflict of interest every time a prosecutor has a police officer in his clutches. it will almost always turn out that there s no enindictmeindic. we have to shift the power dynamic. let me play devil s advocate for a second. you don t look like the devil. that s how the devil works. if the police are have the job of taking risk, physical