© REUTERS / Eduardo Munoz
Last Saturday, Crews, who is also a human rights activist, tweeted that he saw good people as allies regardless of the color of their skin, adding that he was"prepared to die on this hill."He previously expressed concern that the Black Lives Matter movement might slide into black supremacy.
On Monday, Crews spoke about his position and the backlash he faced over it on Don Lemon's CNN program. The two men clashed over whether violence against black people perpetrated by black people should be part of the issues tackled by BLM.
The BLM protests are being steered towards a racially charged antagonistic approach, Crews believes, and people like him are being pushed out of it.
"Black people who are talking about working with whites and other races are viewed as sell-outs. They are called 'uncle toms,'" he said.
Someone wants to control the narrative.He added that the arrogance which drives the radical part of BLM was dangerous for the BLM cause as a whole, because a civil rights movement without a non-racial component will only brew resentment. And ultimately, black supremacism results in black people trading one oppressor for another.
"Black people need to hold black people accountable. This is black America's version of the #MeToo movement," he said.
For example, black-on-black violence is something that BLM leaders don't want to touch. Meanwhile, there are black neighborhoods that "are held hostage by people, who are literally running [them] with violence and then [claiming] that black lives matter."
Lemons said BLM was all about police brutality and the criminal justice system, and that gun violence was beyond its scope - even if it was directed against black people.
Comment: The campaign focus list from the Black Lives Matter website:
- Racial Injustice
- Police Brutality
- Criminal Justice Reform
- Black Immigration
- Economic Injustice
- LGBTQIA+ and Human Rights
- Environmental Conditions
- Voting Rights & Suppression
- Healthcare
- Government Corruption
- Education
- Commonsense Gun Laws
"If someone started a movement that said 'cancer matters,' and then someone came and said 'why aren't you talking about HIV' - it's not the same thing," he said.
The interview divided commenters on Twitter. Some said Crews had embarrassed himself.
Others criticized Lemon for talking over his guest, saying he apparently didn't want an uncomfortable truth about BLM to be aired on CNN.
Comment: It's totally disingenuous of Lemon to say that gun violence is beyond the scope of BLM as he knows full well that BLM has a much broader scope than merely police brutality and criminal justice reform. The numerous and often destructively violent statue riots are a glaringly obvious example of this broader scope in action.
The fact of the matter is that Lemon and the BLM leadership cannot and will not acknowledge the reality of the devastation caused by fatherlessness and black-on-black violence in black communities, because they don't want to look at anything that would undermine their narrative that the situation of black communities is caused entirely by white oppression. In their minds they're victims, and they want to stay that way.