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Iconic Hollywood director Spike Lee has a message for African Americans who support the Black Lives Matter movement: “You can’t ignore that we are killing ourselves too.”
Lee sat down earlier this week for an interview with Anderson Cooper in Chicago’s South Side to promote his new film Chi-Raq, which opens in theaters next month.
The film is about the gang violence, which racks the South Side.
Breitbart reports, “the drug-fueled turf wars between rival gangs is crippling Chicago. There have been more than 2,558 people shot so far this year with 378 of them killed by gunfire. The total homicide count, so far, is more than 428.”
The South Side has become so violent, internet and cable provider Comcast cancelled appointments earlier this week, in the wake of the gang-related execution of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee.
“New York City has three times the population of Chicago, but Chicago has more homicides. This is the spot, Ground Zero,” Lee told Cooper.
The CNN host asked Lee about a previous statement that he had made referring to black-on-black murder as “self-inflicted” genocide.
“Here is the thing, I’m going to be criticized for this, but I don’t care,” the Malcolm X director responded. “I’m all for ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘I Can’t Breathe,’ ‘Don’t Shoot,’ and I’m not speaking on behalf of 45 million African Americans, this is my own belief…You can’t ignore that we are killing ourselves too. You can’t ignore that.”
Lee made the same point in an interview with Chicago Magazine last month, “For me, it goes hand in hand. Only by talking about both and addressing both can we bring change. Cops ain’t just killing us. We’re killing ourselves, too,” he said.
As reported by Western Journalism, celebrated civil rights leader Fred Davis, who marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., shares Lee’s sentiment. This past summer, the businessman placed the message, “Black Lives Matter, So Let’s Stop Killing Each Other” on a billboard next to his office in Memphis.