Filmmaker Spike Lee has made much of his career featuring race as an issue and earned the first Oscar of his career with a film that compared President Trump to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems, however, that it means little to him that millions of black babies have been aborted since Roe v. Wade or the fact that Democrats support an organization founded by a racist eugenicist who once spoke at a Klan rally.
Speaking with reporters outside of the American Film Institute’s lifetime achievement tribute to actor Denzel Washington this week, Spike Lee said Hollywood should commit to boycotting the state of Georgia for protecting unborn children through the passing of the fetal heartbeat bill. He even compared the movement to the civil rights movement’s famous Montgomery bus boycott.
“They got to shut it down, you know?” Spike Lee said, according to the Associated Press. “I’m sorry — I’m not sorry — but I know it’s going to affect people’s livelihood, but that’s how things change.”
“There were black bus drivers in Montgomery and they were affected by the boycott but so be it,” he continued. “You’ve got to be on the right side of history, and the state of Georgia and those other states, they’re wrong.”
Ironically, Spike Lee is not the only black activist to mention the Montgomery bus boycott as a precedent for forcing Georgia to kill unborn children (black and white alike). Most recently, former basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar penned a scathing op-ed in The Hollywood Reporter where he denounced the Georgia and Alabama laws as tools of control by white supremacists.
“Right now the stains include Georgia, Alabama, Missouri and other states passing restrictive abortion legislation that reduces women to baby incubators,” wrote the former NBA star. “The time has come for Americans to defend the principles of the Constitution … For now, one of the best ways to do that is through boycotting the offending states.”
“A boycott is a clear statement that we value conscience over commerce,” he continued. “It means stop doing business with or in these states. For Hollywood, stop making films there. For businesses, stop buying their products or holding conventions or building there. For the average person, don’t visit. No tourism dollars. And we continue this practice until legislators reverse the policies or are removed from office. When the Writers Guild of America, of which I am a member, is willing to boycott talent agencies over packaging practices, certainly they would endorse boycotting states that demean many of their members.”
Jordan Peele, another social justice activist, has also endorsed the Georgia boycott. Yet even failed gubernatorial candidate Stacy Abrams said that people protesting the heartbeat bill in Georgia should do so by other means, not boycotts.
“While I understand the calls for a boycott in Georgia, I’m going to follow a different path,” Abrams told the Los Angeles Times. “I think the superior opportunity for Georgia, in the specific, is to actually use the entertainment industry’s energy to support and fund the work that we need to do on the ground because Georgia is on the cusp of being able to transform our political system.”