MINISTER'S UNFOUNDED CONDEMNATION OF BLACK LIVES MATTER ON FOX NEWS

I have little respect for ministers and so called leaders who go on FOX News to condemn Black Lives Matter. When Dr. King and the SCLC had issues with SNCC they did not tell them to shut up and stop marching! What they tried to do was give them direction. They did not slam them or condemn them as idiots to the media in order to cajole politicians and media groups. When I watched this footage I felt that the minister was overly aggressive and disingenuous in his accusations about Black Lives Matter. He tried to insinuate that Black Lives Matter had no right to demand that politicians on both sides of the aisle discuss one of the major issues of the day: The unfettered killing of African Americans in this country! It ignores the fact that we have been the victims of systemic political and cultural racism for hundreds of years. The current political and cultural environment has choked the life out of blacks for the last 40 years (after the civil rights movement). One of the issues that bother me the most is the new push to legalize weed in all states. Legal Pot distribution is a slap in the face to the black men enslaved by the prison industrial system during the last four decades. The American war on drugs locked black men up for minor possessions of weed. Black men were sentenced to 10 year prison stints under the malfeasance of a corrupt police and court system. It locked up a generation of black men and marginalized them as nothing more than institutional slaves to serve the nefarious needs of our country. Sadly, this prison & drug culture influenced a whole generation of black people to glorify the gangster and criminal motif because many of their fathers, uncles, and brothers were pulled into that life by illicit means. This influence was created and grown by a corrupt government and social acrimony to the plight of African Americans. The media and entertainment industry pushed the thug design to entrap and destroy our people. Many of us willfully embraced it into our culture oblivious to the puppeteers in the government. The few documents we have from COINTELPRO show how deeply the rabbit hole went. Without these documents we would all be called conspiracy theorists and told to shut up. Instead we are told to ignore the facts that these documents present. The truth is that the Government designed and manipulated the plight of the African American in this country over the last 50 years. This was not 100 years ago or during slavery. The system was used against us and we are still feeling the effects. I write all this to point out that the comments of the Minister were disingenuous because it purports that these young people do not have a reason to complain. It suggests that they are rude and ignorant without a just cause or purpose! That is not the case! So I retort to his question by asking: How can you clean up your own community when the leaders and politicians in charge of your community foster institutional malfeasance, murder, and ignorance? I will answer it myself. You challenge the people in power and demand that they change the system. You don't go home and ignore it. You do not stymie those who DEMAND action. My suggestion to Minister Gentry is to continue to work in your community and provide meaningful suggestions to the Black Lives Matter movement without the condemnation and hate peddling you put out in this interview!