Filmmaker Spike Lee says young blacks ignore education

Modesto Bee ^ | 2/6/03 | AP

[hoosierskypilot]

FRESNO, Calif.(AP) - Filmmaker Spike Lee says American culture has young blacks believing they have only three routes to success: playing professional sports, making rap music or selling drugs. "It no longer seems to me that we are preoccupied with education and intelligence. It's not cool," Lee said. "Even sicker, we equate smart and intelligent with being white. Intelligence is white and uncool."

[jjm2111]

A blinding flash of the obvious for Spike.

[No Left Turn]

Interesting. Lee is not blaming whitey, for once.

[jdege]

They feel like education can't get them anywhere?

With the quality of education they're getting in the urban public schools, they're absolutely right.

[hoosierskypilot]

He's a fine one to talk. He can't even talk. Look at his grammar. Besides, why should blacks be motivated to educate themselves? All their problems are whitey's fault. Whitey "gwanna save dem."

Blacks are going to find themselves captive in a world of their own making. White baby boomers are the only schmucks who feel guilty about the blacks ancient problems of repression. Nobody else is going to buy the guilt trip. Not immigrants (they could care less..they've seen true oppression), not young people, nobody.

Reparations? I've paid my reparations. Hundreds of trillions of dollars in a socialist scam called affirmative action.

[js1138]

Too little too late? Time for an attitude update.

[Anti-Bolshevik]

Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

[Anti-Bolshevik]

Ditto on every point!

*high-five*

[DoughtyOne]

Too bad Spike couldn't have made some movies on this very topic over the last decade or so. It would have spared some of the folks he was trying to tell it was all whitey's fault.

[blackdog]

I didn't know Trent Lott could do a Spike Lee impression?

[yankeedame]

Interesting. Lee is not blaming whitey, for once

Which probably means it's been a while since he's had a complete physcial.

[Question_Assumptions]

Spike Lee isn't sure how this attitude change happened? Here's a free clue, Mr. Lee. It isn't American culture that is giving young blacks this attitude but urban black culture. The problem is that people like you have told blacks that they can blame white Americans and anyone else but themselves for their problems, so of course they don't want to "be white" and of course they don't feel any great need to help themselves. Want to get out of this? Tell blacks to take responsibility for their own behavior, as many middle-class blacks already do, and (I'm sure this will seem like magic to you) many of these problems will go away without outside help.

I think Spike Lee needs to sit down and watch his own movie Bamboozled and see the message it sends when you look at how the black characters could have behaved differently to prevent their own problems.

[hot august night]

Don't forget it was also Spike Lee who made the vile public comment that "Charlton Heston deserves to be shot" because of his NRA presidency. So much for his compassion for poor honest blacks stuck in the ghetto who might have the means to defend themselves in those war zones. Let alone that despicable remark about Charlton. Spike Lee can go to hell.

[PBRSTREETGANG]

Lee criticized "Barbershop," a comedy released last year, in which a character belittles civil rights activists Rosa Parks and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Misplaced criticism. He should've criticized Harry Belafonte and the reparations crowd, and praised Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell for their achievements.

[PBRSTREETGANG]

I suspect Lee wouldn't praise Rice and Powell because that would be too "white and uncool".

[Revolting cat!]

If you're old enough, you'll remember the "Stay in School" campaign with the participation of Mr Dynamite himself (him of the Blue Flames,) a successfull (and uneducated) black man. He caught some flack for it from the usual suspects on the Left, as this was during, yes, the Nixon administration. And the results, 30 years later?

[Question_Assumptions]

Interesting. Lee is not blaming whitey, for once.

Sadly, actually he is. When he blames "American culture" for the problem, he's blaming an outside force -- "white people".

It frustrates me to no end that Spike Lee, Chris Rock, and even Jesse Jackson (with his comment that he feels relieved if he hears footsteps behind him and turns to see a white person) seem so close to understanding it yet they all feel compelled to fall back on "It's all whitey keepin' us down" to play to their black audience who doesn't want to hear that it's (at least substantially) their fault.

And, at some point, they need to get a clue about why African Americans burned a lot of the sypathy they might have had by cheering OJ Simpson's release and by rioting in places like LA and Cincinatti. People feel sorry for the downtrodden. They don't feel sorry for menacing threats.

[RicocheT]

Spike Lee, 46

There you go, middle age has caught up with Mr. Lee. That accounts for his attitude change.