Terry Crews tried to explain his position regarding his fear of Black Lives Matter leading to Black supremacy to CNN’s Don Lemon.
In the interview, Crews tries to equate the leaders of the movement to airline industry in the ’60s and ’70s, in which multiple airplane crashes were the result of pilots not wanting their decisions checked (according to Crews).
“When you have the leaders of the Black lives movement, who are now talking about ‘If we don’t get our demands, we’re going to burn it down, and you have other Black people who are talking about working with other whites and other races, they’re being viewed as sellouts and Uncle Toms, you start to understand that you’re now being controlled,” said Crews. “You’re not being treated [in] love, you’re being controlled. I viewed it as a very, very dangerous self-righteousness that was developing that really viewed themselves as better. It was almost a [supremacist] move where they viewed their Black lives mattered more than mine.”
“[Black Lives Matter] is a great mantra. It’s a true mantra. But when you’re talking about an organization, you’re talking about the leaders,” he continued.
Lemon interjected by saying how the civil rights movements of the ’60s, led by Martin Luther King Jr., were viewed as extremist in their day, despite King now being lauded for his nonviolence. “To people who don’t want to make change, movements are seen as extreme. You can paint them easily as extreme when they’re not.”
“This is very true, but when you’re talking about MLK, Nelson Mandela and even Malcolm X, they all realized that you had to have a non-racial component to these kinds of movements or there will be resentment. There will be get-back,” Crews replied. “I don’t want to move from one oppressor to the next,” he continued, and intimated that he believes Black people could be the next oppressors, when pressed by Lemon.
“When you look at the city of Chicago, there are 9 children who died by gun violence, by Black-on-Black gun violence from June 20 all the way to today, and even with the Atlanta child murders, there were 28 kids who died in two years. You’re talking about a month and nine Black kids [have died], and The Black Lives Matter movement has said nothing about this kind of thing,” Crews continued.
Lemon rebutted Crews’ claim about movement leaders saying nothing about gun violence, saying that people in those communities are doing what they can to meet the issues.
“Those people aren’t just being nonchalant about gun violence. I’ve lived in Chicago and there are many people who are working in those communities to try to get rid of the gun violence,” said Lemon. “The gun culture in this country is prevalent, but I don’t understand what has to do with a movement that’s for equality for Black people. It’s not mutually exclusive that you care about equality for Black people that somehow you’re going to stop random violence, or unfortunately, kids from being shot. It just seems like apples and oranges.”
“Black people need to hold other Black people accountable,” said Crews. “This is Black America’s version of the Me Too movement. If anything’s going to change, we, ourselves need to look at our own communities and look at each other and say this thing can not go down…There are a lot of great, great people there [in Chicago], who are held hostage by people who are literally running these neighborhoods with violence and then claiming that Black Lives Matter…It’s got to be all Black Lives Matter.”
You can watch the full exchange below;
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