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Terry Crews Explains ‘Black Supremacy’ Tweet, Complains Of Ideological ‘Gatekeepers’ In ‘Black America’

   DailyWire.com
Actor Terry Crews attends the premiere of "The LEGO Ninjago Movie" at Regency Village Theatre on September 16, 2017 in Westwood, California.
Jason LaVeris/FilmMagic via Getty Images

On June 7, actor Terry Crews sent out a tweet in which he appeared to call out the idea of “black supremacy.”

“Defeating White supremacy without White people creates Black supremacy. Equality is the truth. Like it or not, we are all in this together,” Crews tweeted.

For his tweet, Crews received significant backlash. Tyler James Williams, who co-starred with Crews on “Everybody Hates Chris” responded to the actor’s initial tweet, leading to the following reply from Crews:

On Tuesday, Crews appeared on “The Talk,” where he was asked about the tweet.

“I compare that tweet to cussing in church because what’s wild is you have the message, but then if you use a cuss word, nobody is really hearing what you’re saying,” Crews stated.

The cuss word I used in this instance was “black supremacy,” and this is what I want to really reiterate to you and explain. My thing was, what I said was, defeating white supremacy without white people could create black supremacy.

The actor went on to claim that in “black America,” there are “gatekeepers,” meaning a group of people deciding who is and is not really black, and that he has been “discounted from the conversation a lot of times” because he is married to a “mixed-race” woman.

“I’ve been called all kinds of things like an Uncle Tom,” Crews said. “Simply because I’m successful, simply because I worked my way out of Flint, Michigan.”

The actor then stated frankly that “black people have different views.” He added that if someone is white, they’re allowed to be anywhere on the political spectrum, but if someone is black, it’s assumed that they “have to be one thing.”

“Even Joe Biden said, hey man, you don’t vote for me, you ain’t even black,” Crews noted.

Crews called this kind of thinking, that there is a standard of political behavior by which black people are supposed to abide “a supremest move” because “you have now put yourself above other black people.”

The actor then said that he was told that such a type of supremacy “couldn’t exist,” and that he rebutted that notion by citing the Rwandan genocide

“In 1994, in Rwanda, there was a genocide, and it was all black people, and there was one sector that viewed themselves as over the other. A million people died,” the actor said. “And, you know, I was told it can’t happen in America – and I’m here to tell you, that’s the first mistake. Any time anybody says, ‘Oh, that could never happen here,’ that’s exactly when it starts to happen.”

When asked if he regrets using the term “black supremacy,” Crews said that he couldn’t regret it as he wants “the dialogue to come out.” He added that there is perhaps better terminology for the idea.

The actor said that he himself has “experienced supremacy,” including being told that “the white man is the devil” and seeing black groups that view their suffering as making them somehow better than, rather than equal.

What we’re trying to do, I think a lot of times with the social and economic and political issues we have right now, we’re providing those kind of answers. But this is a spiritual problem. Supremacy can’t really happen, but spiritually it can – in your head, you can look at yourself, and you can develop a dangerous self-righteousness that could really hurt what we’re trying to do right now.

“We have to include this white voice, this Hispanic voice, this Asian voice,” Crews concluded. “We have to include it right now because if we don’t, it’s going to slip into something we are really not prepared for.”

Crews continued to advance his position in an Instagram post on Friday, quoting Martin Luther King Jr., who said: “Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and that God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men, but that God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race, the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers and all men will respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality.”

 

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HAPPY JUNETEENTH #Freedomday

A post shared by Terry Crews (@terrycrews) on

Crews’ Instagram post has more than 140,000 “likes” as of publication.

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