Spike Lee is a racist idiot
According to Fox News, a leading Italian-American group is accusing Spike Lee of having anti-Italian tendencies amid the flap between the director and Clint Eastwood over a lack of African-Americans in Eastwood's World War II films (1).
They are wrong of course, Spike does not hate Italians; he hates whites - all whites. We recall that he even accused whitey of blowing up the levees in his documentary, When the Levees Broke (2). There is not one particle of evidence for that accusation.
It should also be noted that although Spike criticizes Eastwood for not hiring blacks, he has himself been criticized for ignoring whites in his Katrina documentary which focused exclusively on the Ninth Ward's victims and those who are black. Talk about someone calling the kettle white!
It happens that for every 10 black Katrina victims there were 9 white victims - the notion that our government failed to act promptly because Katrina affected mostly blacks (3) is nothing more than racial paranoia which our home-grown racists, Farrakhan/Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton love to exploit.
I don't want movies made to reflect the demographics of this country. Spike Lee has the right to make films where 100% of the actors are black. Can you imagine the outrage if we demanded that he use 87% non-blacks in his films because that's the makeup of this country?
I'm not Hispanic but 90% of the photos of beautiful women in my blog are from South America. That's what I like to publish. I don't care about demographics and it's no one's business to interfere in art or literature or film to force someone to meet ethnic or racial quotas. Racial quotas are immoral even when they are used against whites.
ENDNOTES
(1):
FoxNews, 13 Jun 2008, Spike Lee Accused of Having Anti-Italian Tendencies
"Spike Lee is very talented, but I sometimes wish he'd practice what he preaches," said Bill Dal Cerro, president of the Italic Institute of America, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "His points about African-Americans are well taken, but, ironically, he does the same thing to Italians in his films."
The group has criticized Lee in the past for his portrayal of Italian-Americans in "Do the Right Thing" and "Jungle Fever," and has expressed worry about "Miracle at St. Anna," Lee's upcoming World War II drama set in Italy.
While promoting "Miracle at St. Anna," about the all-black 92nd Buffalo Division which fought the Germans in Italy, Lee said Eastwood's Iwo Jima movie "Flags of Our Fathers" lacked a single African-American.
(2):
US News and World Report, 23 Aug 2006, Q&A with Spike Lee: When the Levees Broke
... But it's not just Katrina, it's also what came with Katrina. What came with Katrina was the breach of the levees–not necessarily Mother Nature, but the poor engineering of the Army Corps of Engineers.
...
Others have criticized you for airing rumors that the hurricane didn't break the levees protecting the Lower Ninth Ward, but men did, with some kind of deliberate explosion. That was done in 1927, to divert water away from other parts of the city, but there is no evidence it happened in 2005. Is it really fair to air a rumor that lacks any evidence?
All I'm doing is letting people express what they feel. Again I think [that's] b–––- criticism to try to sidetrack what is in the film. "When the Levees Broke" is not four hours of crazy black mania explaining "blew up the levees, blew up the levees, blew up the levees." Come on. That probably is like two and a half minutes out of four hours.
(3):
The Boston Globe, 16 Jan 2006, Katrina's racial paranoia
From the beginning, reports on Katrina portrayed the hurricane as not just a natural disaster, not even just a tragic case of government bungling, but a devastating indictment of American racism and social injustice. A headline in the British newspaper, The Guardian, read: ''Hurricane Katrina not only destroyed New Orleans, but also laid bare the ugly truth about America's racial divide." At home, the tenor of the coverage and commentary wasn't all that different, with such headlines as, ''Racism hurts us more than a hurricane." Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean declared, ''We must come to terms with the ugly truth that skin color, age, and economics played a deadly role in who survived and who did not."
As it turns out, Dean got two out of three wrong.
Late last year, after the state of Louisiana released information on the victims whose bodies have been recovered so far, Knight Ridder Newspapers came out with an investigative report analyzing the statistics. A study of the locations where bodies were recovered showed that they were not disproportionately concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. According to the story, ''42 percent of the bodies found in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes were recovered in neighborhoods with poverty rates higher than 30 percent. That's only slightly higher than the 39 percent of residents who lived in such neighborhoods."
And race? In a database on 486 Katrina victims, ''African-Americans outnumbered whites 51 percent to 44 percent. In the area overall, African-Americans outnumber whites 61 percent to 36 percent."
...
The conventional wisdom that Hurricane Katrina had an especially devastating effect on blacks in New Orleans is not entirely mythical. According to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, an analysis of block-by-block census data and flood maps suggests that about half of the city's white residents experienced serious flooding, compared with three-quarters of African-Americans. It was no accident that so many of the refugees at the Superdome were black.
Yet one reason we saw so many black survivors on the news was that mostly white-populated areas the hurricane hit -- St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans, the cities of Biloxi and Gulfport, Miss., -- received relatively little media attention. Partly, this was because some areas were much less accessible than the city in the days after landfall; partly, because flattened houses look much less dramatic than refugees escaping the flood. Later, the media had their narrative in which Katrina victims were poor and black; white people left homeless and waiting in vain for help did not fit the picture.
For some, the race angle clearly served a political agenda. Last October at the ''Millions More March" organized by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan -- with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as featured speakers -- the alleged racism of the Katrina tragedy was a central theme. At congressional hearings on the subject convened in December at the request of Representative Cynthia McKinney, Democrat of Georgia, an outspoken member of the Congressional Black Caucus, words like ''genocide" and ''Holocaust" were bandied about.
Ironically, the focus on African-Americans as victims also ended up perpetuating some racist stereotypes -- such as tales of rape, murder, and other lawlessness among Katrina refugees.
The new data on the demographics of Katrina deaths probably won't change entrenched popular perception (especially with much of the media ignoring the story). Meanwhile, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission says that rebuilding should be permitted in all of the city, even in heavily damaged, flood-prone neighborhoods below water level. One likely reason for the controversial recommendation is that proposals to abandon these neighborhoods, which are mostly black, have been angrily denounced as ethnic cleansing targeting African-Americans. Thus, race-based paranoia may end up putting many black citizens of New Orleans in harm's way -- literally.
