Only Nixon could go to China, according to one of the more enduring political truths of the last half-century.
Just as only a man of color with undeniable credibility in the black community can publicly utter an undeniable truth -- it's not only police who are killing black people in this country, though you'd never know it from much of the media coverage.
It's probably too much to expect director/provocateur Spike Lee to acknowledge that police killings of blacks have plummeted by 75 percent since the early '70s, but what he said today on Meet the Press while plugging his new film was a step in the right direction.
Cueing up Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd's interview with Lee, MTP guest host Andrea Mitchell focused on what was newsworthy about the exchange --
MITCHELL: Spike Lee's new movie Chi-Raq has been called everything from "a collage of provocation and fury" (The New Yorker) to "a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm" (Chicago Sun-Times). The warning bell he is trying to ring is one about guns in America. And while the Pew Research Center says gun violence has declined since the 1990s, the backdrop to the senseless violence depicted in Lee's film is the city of Chicago, where according to the Chicago Tribune there have been almost 3,000 shooting victims this year alone, including a police shooting that left two people dead early Saturday morning. But it's not just police shootings that Spike Lee wanted to draw attention to when he sat down with Chuck to talk about his movie.
More accurately, it was not just police shootings that Todd wanted to draw Lee's attention to, and it took some prodding before Lee agreed --
TODD: Who is the audience for this movie?
LEE: Everybody.
TODD: Well, it's interesting you say that.
LEE: I say everybody, you know why?
TODD: Why?
LEE: Because, I get asked many times, I been making films since 1986 and when you do press for the film, the one question that filmmakers always get -- what is the takeaway? What do you want people thinking when they come out of the theater? .... Usually I say I don't answer that question, but I'm jettisoning it for this film.
I want people to think about guns. That's the takeaway for this film. Eighty-eight Americans die every day due to gun violence. That adds up to 32,000 per year. And it's not just the 'hood ... it affects rural areas, it affects everybody.
TODD: It seems though that you're trying to send a message to black America with this movie. This is not, and ...LEE: Not ... I disagree, I disagree. I think that guns, well I just said guns affect everybody and not just in the 'hood.
TODD (making another attempt): But you seem to be sending the message that it's going to take black Americans to stop this -- don't rely on, this is not about public policy, it's not about that. It seems as if -- take control of this ...
LEE (reluctantly coming around): Well, I would, I wouldn't go far to say it but I do think that I wanted to speak in this film upon black on black violence, that it's not always policemen. You know, it wasn't a cop that killed -- that executed -- Tyshawn Lee, that 9-year-old boy who was lured into the alleyway in Chicago's South Side.
No sooner had Lee said this that he began to backpedal --
LEE: So I think that, to me, I don't car-, the complexion, the color of the trigger finger, the trigger finger does not matter to me. If you kill somebody, you kill somebody, no matter who you are.
But apparently the "color of the trigger finger" does matter to Lee -- because only moments earlier, after prodding from Todd, Lee said that "I wanted to speak in this film upon black on black violence." If the complexion of the person pulling the trigger matters so little to him, as presumably it does of the person taking the bullet, why does Lee mention complexion twice in what he wants to speak about in his new film?
