Deroy Murdock:
I heard the news today. Oh, boy! Al Sharpton has called an emergency meeting.
Hallelujah!
At last, an emergency meeting to address the 10.4 percent black unemployment rate. That is well above the overall 5.6 percent jobless figure and more than double the 4.8 percent of whites who are without work.
Well, if not that, surely Sharpton plans an emergency meeting on the fact that 32 percent of black students never graduate from high school. How can black Americans advance when a third of us never make it out of the K-12 system? Well, they do, but their minds don’t.
Okay, then, Sharpton must be arranging an emergency meeting to address the 5,635 blacks who were murdered by other blacks in 2013. This is a massive and tragic outrage, especially compared to the estimated 96 blacks who were killed by white cops that year, according to the latest data. (This includes armed and unarmed people, accidents, and the justifiable deaths of black criminals who were shot by cops as they broke the law.) For every black person killed by white cops, 58 were murdered by fellow black people. Surely this merits an emergency meeting.
No such luck!
Sharpton will stage an emergency meeting to pout because the only black-oriented Academy Award nomination this year is the Best Picture bid for Selma. That film is the first major title to focus on the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Evidently, there are emergencies, and then there are EMERGENCIES!
Sharpton complains that “The movie industry is like the Rocky Mountains, the higher you get, the whiter it gets.”
How odd.
Just last year, Hollywood looked like less like the Rockies and more like Mt. Kilimanjaro.
The most recent Academy Award for Best Picture went to 12 Years a Slave, a gripping and very tough-to-watch true story about a free man sold into slavery and brutalized, along with other blacks owned as personal property. Hollywood did not flinch from depicting the physical agony endured by those trapped in that barbaric institution. The movie accurately could have been called 12 Years of Lashings. It also won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley). The film was nominated in six other categories, including Best Director (Steve McQueen).
So, if Sharpton is correct, in just twelve months, the Academy Awards have devolved from a celebration of black cinematic achievement to the Oskkkars.
Meanwhile, Cheryl Boone Isaacs does not look like the Rocky Mountains. That’s because she is black. Isaacs is the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which bestows those coveted gold statuettes.
Sharpton’s “emergency meeting” and threatened “possible action around the Academy Awards” are likely about how to shake down Hollywood.
On January 4, the New York Post detailed Sharpton’s successful and highly lucrative extortion of major corporations. Major companies show him the money as soon as he yells “Racism!”
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Selma, $17 million in Box Office.
Total.
That’s pathetic.
It ranks 3,218th in total box office with duds like IMAX’s Thrill Ride from 1997 making more!
Even 12 Years a Slave got $87 million, still way lower than any decent blockbuster.
Did Interstellar get an Oscar nod? $189 million.
The LEGO Movie? $258 million.
Al Sharpton has his personal priorities in order; he’s always after the almighty dollar.
There’s no money in black unemployment or black-on-black crime.
Let the reverend in name only, shake down his fellow lefties. Maybe Spielberg will make a movie called “The Color Green”. It would be a sure fire nominee for best picture.
Just wait till he finds out all the Oscars are gold and none are cut from ebony. Trouble brewing.