Left-wing director Spike Lee has joined the effort to topple Confederate monuments, telling the Black List podcast that they all “need to come the “fuck” down.
“Fuck that flag,” Lee told the podcast hosts, according to Variety. “That flag, to me, [makes me feel] the same way my Jewish brothers and sisters feel about the swastika… And them motherfucking Confederate statues need to come the fuck down.”
Lee then insisted that his 1989 hit, Do The Right Thing has taken on new relevance in this age of Black Lives Matter protests and race riots following the death of George Floyd.
“It’s like the film was made yesterday,” Lee exclaimed. “So, there are two ways to think about it. That it’s still unique. It’s still new. And then also, Black people are still being murdered [and] dying. If you’ve seen Do the Right Thing, how can you not automatically think of Eric Garner, and then king George Floyd?”
The Malcolm X director added that maybe he didn’t make the film for black people. “It’s never been about how [Black people] respond to it. It’s been about how our white sisters and brothers respond to it.”
“And have you been watching CNN like I have? People are marching all over God’s Earth chanting, yelling [and] screaming ‘Black lives matter,’ and they’re not Black… That’s the big difference. You see a young generation of my white brothers and sisters [and] they are out there in full effect,” he added. “I mean, forget about the rest of the world for a second. White folks are marching in Salt Lake City [and] Des Moines, Iowa, where there ain’t no Black folks for a minute.”
Indeed, the Oscar-winner is correct about the racial makeup of the Black Lives Matter marches. A recent review of many of these marches’ racial makeup has shown that only 17 percent of participants are black. A report by Pew Research showed that black people only made up 17 percent of the protests while whites constituted 46 percent of the numbers. And 22 percent were Hispanics.
In any case, Spike has made a career out of tearing down the country that has made him a multi-millionaire. Only last week he was proclaiming that the U.S.A. was built on genocide and slavery.
“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.” the BlacKkKlansman director told radio host Joe Madison. “Whenever this day comes, when we go back to supposed normalcy. What they called normal was abnormal.”
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