by Jason Mattera
03/26/2012
Race hustler Spike Lee is at it again, this time stoking the flames of racial tension in the tragic death of the Florida teenager, Trayvon Martin.
Lee took to Twitter on Friday urging his followers to repost George Zimmerman’s address, the community watch volunteer who shot Martin last month after a struggle where Zimmerman was allegedly attacked by the 17-year-old.
Lee’s announcing the home address on Twitter to his 250,000 followers had the intended response, as Lee supporters replied with a slew of death threats toward Zimmerman including “Dead,” “Let’s go smash this n*#gga,” and “Let’s turn up the heat on his b*tch ass.”
It may prove difficult for Lee, however, to fit the shooting neatly into his simple “black-white” view of the world because Zimmerman happens to be Hispanic.
Regardless, Spike Lee’s history of racially incendiary remarks and flat-out racism, as I chronicle in Hollywood Hypocrites: The Devastating Truth About Obama’s Biggest Backers, should instantaneously discredit him from feigning outrage over any type of racial bias. Moreover, as Barack Obama foolishly inserts himself into the Martin death and turns it into a lecture to America about race relations, the president has no problem associating himself with the bigot filmmaker.
Upon visiting South Africa in the early 90s, Spike Lee told London’s Guardian newspaper that “I seriously wanted to pick up a gun and shoot whites. The only way to resolve matters is by bloodshed.” And if we’re thinking of chalking that crazy remark up to Lee being carried away in his early 30s, not so fast. Flash forward to the present and we can see that Spike Lee has never met a racial metaphor or racist statement he didn’t like to use.
Lee saw Obama’s triumph in the Democrat primary as a chance to move beyond “massuh Clinton.” As Spike put it, “The Clintons, man, they would lie on a stack of Bibles...I voted for Clinton twice, but that’s over with. These old black politicians say, ‘Ooh, Massuh Clinton was good to us, massuh hired a lot of us, massuh was good!’ Hoo! Charlie Rangel, David Dinkins—they have to understand this is a new day.”
Of course, Lee has no use to Republican blacks including Justice Clarence Thomas and Gen. Colin Powell, both of whom he accuses of “think[ing] like whites.” Nor does he have any love for successful black moviemakers like Tyler Perry who he chided for producing “coonery and buffoonery.” Spike’s beef with Perry seems to originate in the fact that Perry is doing something Lee has seemed incapable of doing over the last decade—creating movies that actually make money and draw a crowd.
Spike Lee has even lashed out at Eddie Murphy, insinuating that he was a race traitor and Uncle Tom for selling out to a movie business dominated by white interests, as well as African American actors Ving Rhames and Cuba Gooding Jr. for behaving in a “servile” way.
And as I point out in Hollywood Hypocrites, Spike Lee despises interracial marriage, a stance that must have been a source for considerable embarrassment when his dad, jazz musician Bill Lee, wed a Jewish white woman.
Bottom line: Spike Lee has said a boatload of deplorable things over the decades, and yet Obama doesn’t care. In fact, Obama and Spike are tight. According to Lee, Obama told him that the first movie he ever took Michelle Obama to see was Spike Lee’s movie Do the Right Thing. “I’m riding my man Obama. I think he’s a visionary. Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, ‘Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to Soul Man.’ Michelle would have been like, ‘What’s wrong with this brother?’ ”
Spike also hosts star-studded celebrity events for Obama, fundraisers that rake in more than a million in one evening.
What happened to Trayvon Martin is awful. A young boy had his life cut short. But investigators don’t know if the shooting was racially-motivated. And neither does Obama. So before the president prematurely injects race into a deadly shooting, perhaps he should do some “soul searching” of his own and question why he proudly breaks bread with a Hollywood hatemonger like Spike Lee.
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To read another article by Jason Mattera, click here.
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