Eastwood puts Lee in his place

After a long absence it seems that I am picking up right where I left off, another black celebrity bemoaning the lack of black faces in the media. This time however it is US director, Spike Lee who said of Eastwood’s film Flags of our Fathers;

That was his version. The Negro version did not exist

An extremely pointless and unhelpful comment but one that seems to pervade the mentality of many leading black celebrities. As if every historical event should be based on today’s ethnic make up, rather than reality.

Eastwood retorted:

The story is Flags of Our Fathers, the famous flag-raising picture, and they didn’t do that. It’s not accurate.

Quite right, adding black faces to a historical event would be implying that we need to be represented to make us feel better, or even implying that we do not have enough famous historical events of our own to be proud of, therefore we must muscle in on those of others. Not to mention the disrespect to the one who is replaced. How would the family of Mr Smith (I don’t know the names of the men involved) feel if he were replaced by a negro in all future representations of this iconic image? Pretty pissed off I imagine.

This attitude is becoming quite worrying, where certain leading black figures seem to feel unwanted, unappreciated or disrespected if they do not see a black face in everything that they view.

I haven’t seen many of Mr Lee’s film, but those that I have seen did appear to be quite light on white faces. Even though 80% of America is white. Clearly this compulsion to balance things out doesn’t extend the other way.

I find this kind of view of the world disturbing, particularly in light of past events; as if being equal isn’t enough, now we have to appear equal in all aspects, regardless of the fact that in the West, blacks are a minority. I don’t live in a black nation, nor does Mr Lee. I have accepted that, clearly Mr Lee has not.

After basically accusing Clint Eastwood of being racist, you can understand why he told Spike to shut his face and said that his film Bird featured a 90% black cast and his upcoming film about South Africa will not feature a white Mandela! Very smoothly handled by Eastwood who must have been extremely insulted by being smeared racist.

I am sure that Mr Lee’s voice carries a lot of weight amongst the black community in the US and now, thanks to his ill thought out comments, many blacks will be trying to spot the black face in Eastwood’s movies, or worse, forever view him as being racist.

A shame really, as the one of the pair who is undeniably a racist is Spike Lee, although I doubt that you’ll ever hear anyone call him that. He seems to be of the view that racist is a noun that only applies to white people. Just take some of his comments as an example;

The most overrated player of all time, I would say it’d be Larry Bird. Now, Larry Bird is one of the greatest players of all time, but listen to the white media, it’s like this guy was like nobody ever played basketball before him

I don’t know a lot about basketball, but I do know that Larry Bird is white and certainly the only white player that I have ever heard of. Just the tone and words he uses is clear enough to me to be from racist ‘white media’, the media is the media, giving it a colour again implies some sort of unfairness.

Basketball is a black dominated sport and maybe there are better black players, however taking away the achievements of a player, purely because of his race, and thus robbing a race of a hero is shocking and would not be countenanced were it a white person making the statement.

Imagine if a white person were to say;

The most overrated player of all time, I would say it’d be Tiger Woods. Now, Tiger Woods is one of the greatest players of all time, but listen to the black media, it’s like this guy was like nobody ever played golf before him

For me there is no difference between the statements.

Lee’s ignorance is also quite shocking, he accused Eastwood of making two films about Iwo Jima with neither of them featuring blacks, the military, like everything else in the US was segregated during WWII, there weren’t any black soldiers mixed in with the white soldiers. Moreover Eastwood’s film did contain black soldiers, clearly Lee hadn’t bothered to watch them.

Spike Lee’s film about the Miracle at St Anna has apparently upset the survivors and the relatives of the victims, although I cannot find any information pertaining to the reason for the upset, I really hope he hasn’t just added black people to the events purely for the sake of it.