Spike Lee Endorses “Brother Bernie”
Filmmaker Spike Lee loves basketball. Throughout the NBA season, you can often see him cheerfully ensconced in his Madison Square Garden courtside seat, where Knicks' season tickets can cost as much as $3,000 per game. That may sound like a lot of money to you, but for Spike Lee it's no big deal. Spike's' net worth, you see, is about $40 million. In 1998 he purchased a 9,000-square-foot New York City townhouse for $16 million, and fourteen years later he put it on the market for $32 million. And now, this humble Champion of the Common Folk has dramatically announced that he's “officially endorsing” the man he calls “my brother Bernie Sanders” for the U.S. presidency. Why? Because Brother Bernie knows that America's economic system “is rigged” in favor of all those greedy rich people, and you can bet that he “will do the right thing” to fix their wagon. Er, um …
Well, of course there's also Brother Bernie's great record on civil rights. As Spike reminds us: “Bernie was at the March on Washington with Dr. King. He was arrested in Chicago for protesting segregation in public schools. He fought for wealth and education equality throughout his whole career.” By any measure, that's a most impressive resumé: attendance at two rallies, followed by decades of picking taxpayers' pockets and giving their money to left-wing voting constituencies. What could be more American than that?
We ought to listen attentively when Spike Lee talks about matters involving race and social justice, given his long track record of eloquence on the subject. Indeed, who could forget his stirring 2014 analysis of an influx of new white residents to certain historically black New York City neighborhoods, where, to Spike's great distress, the newcomers weren't altogether fond of the loud music that some of the long-term residents liked to play? Said Spike:
“We [blacks] been here!... Then comes the motherfu**in’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfu**in’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherfu**in’-sixty-eight, and the motherfu**in’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father.... Get the fu** outta here!”
But Spike's insightful remarks about race can be traced back much further than 2014. After visiting apartheid-era South Africa in the early 1990s, for instance, he said: “I seriously wanted to pick up a gun and shoot whites. The only way to resolve matters is by bloodshed.”
Around that same time, Spike reflected on how deeply he despised Lilies of the Field, the classic 1963 film depicting a respectful and loving relationship between a black handyman named Homer Smith (Sidney Poitier) and a convent of white nuns. “I hated that movie,” said Spike. “... I felt like putting a rock through the [TV] screen. Later with these nuns! You [Smith] better get outta here before one of 'em [nuns] says that you raped 'em!”
On other occasions, Spike has candidly articulated his contempt for black-white couples. “I give interracial couples a look,” he once said. “Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.” Spike was subsequently asked about this topic in an interview with Playboy magazine and said: “I never see black men with fine white women. They be ugly. Mugly, dogs. And you always see white men with good-looking black women.... I just don't find white women attractive, that's all.”
Giving voice to his belief that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to eradicate nonwhites and homosexuals, Spike once told Rolling Stone magazine: “I’m convinced AIDS is a government-engineered disease. [But] they got one thing wrong; they never realized it couldn’t just be contained to the groups it was intended to wipe out.”
In 2006 Spike produced and directed a movie for HBO entitled When the Levees Broke—a reference to the devastating floods of Hurricane Katrina that had engulfed much of New Orleans the previous year. Regarding rumors that the U.S. government had somehow engineered the flooding of that city's mostly black Ninth Ward, Spike said: “It’s not too far-fetched. I don’t put anything past the United States government. I don’t find it too far-fetched that they tried to displace all the black people out of New Orleans.”
In March 2012, soon after the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman had shot and killed Trayvon Martin in their infamous altercation, Spike used his Twitter account to circulate Zimmerman's home address. This came at a time when Zimmerman was already receiving numerous death threats, and when the New Black Panther Party was offering a large bounty for Zimmerman's capture—“Dead or Alive.” The address that Spike supplied, however, turned out to be incorrect, forcing the actual occupants to flee their home due to the numerous death threats which they began to receive.
And just last month, Spike announced that because, for the second consecutive year, no African Americans had received an Oscar nomination for the “best actor” category, he would not be attending the February 28 Academy Awards ceremony.
Notwithstanding his keen eye for detecting racial slights, Spike isn't the least bit shy about reprimanding black conservatives because “they think like whites” and they don't understand that “there’s a difference between having black skin and black thinking.” On one occasion, Spike explained that the late Malcolm X, if he were still alive, would have viewed conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as “a handkerchief-head, chicken-and-biscuit-eating Uncle Tom.”
Pretty darned eloquent, huh? No wonder Spike's a professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Hopefully Brother Bernie is proud to accept Spike Lee's weighty political endorsement. Having a forty-million-dollar Champion of the Common Folk—and of Interracial Harmony—in your corner certainly can't hurt.