A regular guest on MSNBC compared an older version of the American flag to the Nazi swastika and a burning cross on July 3.
Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, defended Nike canceling its line of shoes that were emblazoned with the flag, which is known as the Betsy Ross American flag.
The flag was linked to slavery, Dyson said, before Hallie Jackson, an anchor at the network, brought up the position that the cancellation was political correctness, or PC culture, “run amok.”
“Words matter. Symbols matter, too,” Dyson responded. “Why don’t we wear a swastika for July 4th? Because, I don’t know, it makes a difference. The cross burning on somebody’s lawn. Why don’t we just have a Nike celebration of the cross—those symbols are symbols of hate. So we can take PC culture back.”
The white supremacist Ku Klux Klan organization regularly burned crosses on lawns.
Dyson is also a contributing writer to the New York Times opinion section and a contributing editor to the New Republic and ESPN’s The Undefeated website.
Nike’s decision was reportedly made after Colin Kaepernick, a former NFL player who started kneeling during the national anthem, complained that the Betsy Ross flag was “offensive.”
The flag was on the new Nike Air Max I, which were colored red, white, and blue.
The company did not publicly state that Kaepernick was involved at all.
“Nike has chosen not to release the Air Max 1 Quick Strike Fourth of July as it featured the old version of the American flag,” a spokeswoman for the company told Market Watch.
Dyson later said on Wednesday that the Betsy Ross flag is part of the culture war.
“This is waging a war of interpretation on the landscape of American popular culture for the collective mind set of America. People have their right to weigh in as they choose. But the reality is that this flag has represented something that’s offensive and if people want to he claim it, do so,” he said.
“It’s like the argument about the statues. The statues are there for education. Hmm, I don’t hear people talking about Robert E. Lee as a moment of educating us about the efficiency viciousness of white supremacy. So, were that to occur, it would be great. It just hasn’t happened.”
Dyson has made a number of controversial comments in the past.
In 2013, Dyson said that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s vote to overturn a provision of the Voting Rights Act was like if “a symbolic Jew invited a metaphoric Hitler to commit holocaust and genocide upon his own people.”
The Anti-Defamation League condemned his comments as “outrageous and shocking.”
“While one has a right to agree or disagree with Supreme Court decisions, we are shocked that anyone would draw such an outrageous comparison between a ruling rendered by justices working within the bounds of our constitutional democracy, and the murderous deeds of the Nazis during the Holocaust,” said Abraham Foxman, the director of the league at the time and a Holocaust survivor, said in a statement.
“As we have said repeatedly, there is no place for comparisons between social or political issues in the 21st century and the genocidal actions of Hitler and the Nazis, whose crimes against humanity and role in the deaths of six million Jews and millions of others were unique in history and should be respected as such. It is particularly painful when Mr. Dyson references the pernicious notion of a Jew who turns on his own people.”
