On Friday, CNN’s The Situation Room thought it would be a good idea to welcome Prof. Michael Eric Dyson to the show to reflect on the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, who promptly used the opportunity to bash both those who oppose DEI initiatives and the country as a whole as racists.
Co-host Pamela Brown simply wondered, “What do you see as the biggest failure from Katrina?”
Dyson began by pretending that he was simply telling it like it is, “Well, look, let's be real: that economic inequality is connected to racial oppression in this nation. This is not somebody standing, ‘Aha! We don't like you. We hate you.’ It's about the consequence of systemic injustice.”
Moving towards the present day, Dyson added that “systemic injustice” is “a word that has been nearly banned in this radical anti-DEI era that we live in. And as a result of that, if we live in a society where just the mention of DEI evokes negative viewpoints about black people or women or other minoritized populations, we're living in the arena of racialized oppression, and we're living in the arena of racism, naked and raw.”
Dyson concluded:
And that's a vicious reality we have to confront. So one of the greatest failures is our inability to grapple with the racial inequality, the economic inequality, and the social injustice that needs to be addressed, that the government, with its resources, could certainly do. And until we make up our minds to address this with dispatch and aplomb, and to do it efficiently, the people who will suffer most are the people who have already suffered most: black people, poor people, and those who are vulnerable to downturns in the economy in our nation.
Whether it is the George W. Bush or Donald Trump administration, left-wing activists with advanced degrees just can’t help themselves. They smear their opponents and the whole country as racist and then pretend their critics simply don’t like people being educated about the history of slavery, and CNN parades them in front of the camera as if they have something profoundly intellectual to say.
Here is a transcript for the August 29 show:
CNN The Situation Room
8/29/2025
11:27 AM ET
PAMELA BROWN: What do you see as the biggest failure from Katrina?
MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: Well, look, let's be real: that economic inequality is connected to racial oppression in this nation. This is not somebody standing, “Aha! We don't like you. We hate you.”
It's about the consequence of systemic injustice. A word that has been nearly banned in this radical anti-DEI era that we live in. And as a result of that, if we live in a society where just the mention of DEI evokes negative viewpoints about black people or women or other minoritized populations, we're living in the arena of racialized oppression, and we're living in the arena of racism, naked and raw.
And that's a vicious reality we have to confront. So one of the greatest failures is our inability to grapple with the racial inequality, the economic inequality, and the social injustice that needs to be addressed, that the government, with its resources, could certainly do. And until we make up our minds to address this with dispatch and aplomb, and to do it efficiently, the people who will suffer most are the people who have already suffered most: black people, poor people, and those who are vulnerable to downturns in the economy in our nation.
