Friday

April 19th, 2024

Insight

Reverend Al Goes to Hollywood

Bernard Goldberg

By Bernard Goldberg

Published Jan. 19, 2015

 Reverend Al Goes to Hollywood

I don't know about you, but I think Al Sharpton gets a bad rap.

The guy can't do anything without conservatives jumping all over him. Even when he does something clearly worthwhile, all he gets is grief from Whitey.

Take Sharpton's latest attempt to make America a better place. He's called for an "emergency meeting" to deal with the lack of diversity in Hollywood. Everybody knows Hollywood liberals hate black people but apparently Al Sharpton is the only one who has the guts to say it out loud.

The issue is the Academy Awards, where each year beautiful white people get all dressed up and tell each other how wonderful they are. Turns out that all the nominees for best actor this year are white; all the nominees for best actress … white; all the nominees for best director — white again. In the past two decades this has only happened one other time.

As Sharpton — President Obama's go-to man on race — so elegantly put it: ""The movie industry is like the Rocky Mountains, the higher you get, the whiter it gets." There are rumors that Sharpton soon will hold another "emergency meeting," this time in Aspen, to deal with another issue involving diversity. The working title of the meeting is "Why the hell is snow always white?"

Sharpton might have called for an emergency meeting to deal with fatherlessness in Black America, where the out-of-wedlock birth rate is north of 70 percent. He might have called for an emergency meeting to deal with the disproportionately high number of black kids who drop out of high school. He might have called an emergency meeting to deal with black crime, whose victims are overwhelmingly black people.

But there are just so many hours in the day, so Al had to prioritize. Memo to Whitey: Lay off the Rev, a man who never lets an opportunity (to stoke racial tensions) go to waste.

Comment by clicking here.

Columnists

Toons