CNN host Don Lemon clashed with actor and activist Terry Crews over his opinion that Black Lives Matter doesn’t care about all black lives.
During an interview on Monday, Crews defended his position that he feels the Black Lives Matter movement has become silent on pressing issues that affect black people, including inner-city violence, which Lemon characterized as comparing apples to oranges.
“Black people need to hold other black people accountable,” Crews said. “If anything is going to change, we ourselves, we need to look at our own communities and look at each other and say this thing cannot go down.”
Crews insisted that recent shootings in Chicago, where 87 people were shot and 17 people were killed over the Fourth of July weekend, are ignored by some Black Lives Matter activists. “All black lives matter,” Crews said.
Lemon said Crews shouldn’t be surprised people are criticizing him and later claimed that Black Lives Matter is a movement specifically focused on police brutality. “The Black Lives Matter movement is about police brutality and injustice in that manner,” Lemon said, later refusing to let Crews finish his sentences.
According to Black Lives Matter’s statement of beliefs, its purpose is “imagining and creating a world free of anti-Blackness, where every Black person has the social, economic, and political power to thrive.”
The organization says it has expanded over time to focus on economic, political, and social issues that affect black women and members of the gay and transgender community. At one point, it writes, “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.”
