How so? Why would Jackson be apologizing from street crime? I’m pretty sure he’s never mugged anyone.
Not for street crime, he was admitting to sometimes feeling fear of young black men and expressing shame about it (i.e. “apologizing” for it).
He was confessing to a weakness, even to hypocrisy. He was not defending the feeling. Essentially, the OP is asking whether he apologized for confessing human imperfection.
He didn’t express shame; he expressed pain - that’s a big difference. Shame would imply he felt the fault lay within him for feeling something that had no basis in reality. Pain would imply that there were legitimate reasons why an older man might be worried if he saw a group of young black men following him and that he was unhappy that that reality existed.
In support of this, I found some more context. Here’s what Jackson said, “We must face the No. 1 critical issue of our day. It is youth crime in general and black-on-black crime in particular. There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. After all we have been through, just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”
You would need to sign up for a free trial to read it, but this link goes to a November 1993 article in the Chicago Sun-Times that gives a longer account of what Jackson said at the PUSH meeting.
Well that’s what I meant: that he was saying there are parts of the country where crime is much higher amongst the black community than the white community, so sometimes even the Reverend is relieved to find he’s being followed by someone white, which upsets him.
Did anyone else think was going to be about the “I want to cut his nuts off” comment (which he did apologize for profusely) instead?
I think we’re in agreement. I just don’t know where you’re getting the ‘some parts of the country’ thing. He didn’t say that. He was talking about a general feeling and his comments don’t seem to be restricted to particular cities or neighborhoods.
Unfortunately for him, there were cameras and microphones at that one. And YouTube had been invented. 
Actually I was thinking this was going to be about Hymietown.
Try this link for the whole Sun-Times article (I can’t guarantee it’ll work) http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_action=doc&p_topdoc=1&p_docnum=1&p_sort=YMD_date:D&p_product=NewsBank&p_text_direct-0=document_id=(%200EB42167B5EB3CB0%20)&p_docid=0EB42167B5EB3CB0&p_theme=aggdocs&p_queryname=0EB42167B5EB3CB0&f_openurl=yes&p_nbid=G52T47ECMTI3MTM4MDIyNy4xOTU1NTg6MToxNDoyMTYuMTQ3LjIxNS4zMw&&p_multi=CSTB
The date of the article is given as Monday, Nov. 29, 1993. So “last Saturday” would be Nov. 27. I’ve updated wikiquote.
Nice work!
What would have been the response of those who are dropping all over themselves to explain “The Rev” if he were white? Oh! Not just white - say Rush or Newt? Would you have accused them of being racist? That is the point to ponder. FBI data indicate that more than 75percent of crimes against black people are by black males under 30.
Well, it’s sure fun to speculate about other how other people would be hypocrites, isn’t it? Especially zombie hypocrites.
But given the exact sentence as prefaced (“There is nothing more painful to me…”) it hardly sounds like someone speaking as an unrepentant racist. It’s a thought-provoking comment, a confessional one, whether it came from a black person or a white person. It would be a little bit of a non-sequitur for a white person to reference black-on-black crime and then talk about their own experience walking down the street, but I assume in a necessarily different context, it would still be hard to paint it as anything other than something the speaker regretted.
In the case of Rush or Newt, I’d probably think they were trying to score some good-guy points instead of being sincere, but that’s because those two are assholes with histories of being insincere, not because they’re white.
This is an old thread and I’m not sure why you’ve resurrected it, but I don’t think this comparison makes much sense. The equivalent would be for Rush Limbaugh to say “There is nothing more painful to me … than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody black and feel relieved.” It’s in such a radically different context to the Reverend that I don’t think it even makes sense to consider it.
Isn’t that what Jesse Jackson was addressing? I mean I’ve read the entire quote and everything, and I speak as an oppressed white male.
Let me guess. You’re just asking questions.
And you probably have black friends.