Back when Officer Darren Wilson gunned down Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, many – most – believed there was a racial element to the shooting. Now, in a new interview with the New Yorker’s Jake Halpern, it has finally come out that Wilson is very much racist after all… and Halpern calls him out on it!
That interview with Wilson, took place at his enigmatic home which he described as located somewhere “on the outskirts of St. Louis.”
Wilson claimed all along that he wasn’t racist and that race played no factor in him unloading his firearm on an unarmed man, even as he was some significant distance away from him.
“Everyone is so quick to jump on race. It’s not a race issue.”
But in the interview, Wilson describes a “blind, black, single mother” who Gawker summarizes his opinion of her as being “powerless to stop her kids from causing trouble and allegedly committing crimes, no matter how many times Wilson tried to catch them carrying weapons.”
Wilson digs in further, saying, “They ran all over the mom. They didn’t respect her, so why would they respect me?”
Just in case you thought this was merely a personal anecdote, Wilson makes it clear that he is extrapolating to all of Black American culture.
“They’re so wrapped up in a different culture than—what I’m trying to say is, the right culture, the better one to pick from.”
He seems to catch himself, stop himself, and in trying to “fix” how it sounds, he makes it worse by saying the “right culture.”
Halpern even called out Wilson on these obvious racial stereotypes and undertones. He noted the implications of using phrases like this “better culture”.
Wilson doubled down.
“I am really simple in the way that I look at life,” Wilson continued. “What happened to my great-grandfather is not happening to me. I can’t base my actions off what happened to him.”
But Halpern wasn’t going to let him get away with this, since Wilson was raised by a mother who frequently wrote intentionally bad checks. Wilson said that he was so worried about her stealing money from his jobs that he set up decoy bank accounts.
He worried that she would steal what little money he made working summer jobs, so he opened two bank accounts. The first, which had almost no money in it, was a decoy. He put his real earnings in the second, secret account. Wilson also tried to preëmpt his mother’s stealing. Once, he warned a friend’s parents not to let her inside their house, because she would surely find a way to steal their identities and max out their credit cards.
Dean was loving, Wilson said. “She never wanted to hurt us.” He added, “But when it came to money she was going to get it, one way or another.”
When this was pointed out, Wilson said he doesn’t want to think about Brown much, because that would be “living in the past.”
But alas, he says he is forced to think of Brown sometimes.
“You do realize that his parents are suing me? So I have to think about him.” He continued, saying “do I think about who he was as a person? Not really, because it doesn’t matter at this point.”