Last night’s exchange between CNN host Don Lemon and black actor Terry Crews starkly underlined the divisions within the black community over whether all Black lives matter.
Crews ran afoul of more radical supporters of Black Lives Matter when he Tweeted that all black lives matter.
The actor made the assertion in reference to the dozens of Black lives lost, including children, in the wake of the George Floyd riots and continuing black gang violence in major metropolitan cities, noting that BLM had nothing to say about those lives.
Supporters of BLM were quick to castigate Crews, calling him a “coon” and questioning his “Blackness” among other things.
Later that evening Lemon had Crews on his show to talk about his views and the reaction.
The interview did not go well and Lemon interrupted Crews repeatedly and argued that all black lives do not matter to BLM because the organization is interested in police brutality and the lives lost at the hands of police only.
Lemon is entitled to his opinion, but the Black Lives Matter organization has goals that go well beyond ending police brutality.
BLM’s website makes it clear that the organization is politically motivated and includes such goals as ending economic injustice, government corruption and implementing common sense gun laws to name but a few.
Nowhere, however, does BLM ever say that it wants to end black on black violence.
In Lemon’s view black on black violence is inconsequential because blacks will kill blacks just as whites will kill whites.
But black on black crime is of consequence, as Crews and other black commentators have noted, because black communities bear the brunt of this violence disproportionately.
That is true in the United States, Canada and indeed all the West.
The drive-by shootings, after all, do not happen in gated communities, in affluent suburbs or small towns.
No, the violence happens in large metropolitan cities where gangs vie with each other for control over the proceeds of crime – primarily drugs.
And it is that very violence, ironically enough, that brings them into contact with police.
That is also what makes the BLM movement so disingenuous and such a distraction from the very real problems faced by innocent people trapped in poor neighborhoods.
The BLM movement plays on people’s emotions and demands of them total subservience to the cause for fear of being called out as a racist.
Crews was right to take BLM and Lemon to task. Outright lies should never unchallenged.
Sooner or later, the sane, adult views of those within the Black community will prevail, because the hypocrisy of BLM and its supporters is laid bare each and every day.
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