America was founded upon genocide, slavery, and theft, said Hollywood director and actor Spike Lee in a recent interview with Joe Madison on his radio show.
“The foundation of the United States of America is immoral, from the get-go. The foundation has been shaky from day one. This country was based upon the stealing of the land from native people and genocide against native people, coupled with slavery.” Spike Lee said. “Whenever this day comes, when we go back to supposed normalcy. What they called normal was abnormal.”
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“The foundation of the United States of America is immoral, from the get-go. The foundation has been shaky from day one,” Lee said. “This country was based upon the stealing of the land from native people and genocide against native people, coupled with slavery. That is how this country was built.”
The BlacKkKlansman directed was promoting his latest film Da 5 Bloods, about army veterans who return to Vietnam to bring home the body of their squad leader.
“We’ve been patriotic for this country from day one,” said Lee of black Americans. “We’ve been here 401 years and we still haven’t got, you know, a full citizenship. If that was the case, we wouldn’t be getting shot down in the street left and right.”
The death of George Floyd is linked to the enslavement of blacks, stated Lee. “We have to fundamentally change everything [from] top to bottom. This gap that was exposed — not to the have-nots, but to the haves — has to be shrunk across the board, health care, economics, education. We cannot go back to normal, because normal was effed up.”
Lee wore a black baseball hat with “1619” embroidered on it. It’s an apparent nod to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” which won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. The Times however has acknowledged that a central claim in Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project is false.
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