Former Super Bowl champion and NFL legend Ray Lewis has posted a video blitzing the #BlackLivesMatter movement for not speaking up on Black-on-Black crime. Oh yeah, he thinks Black people could learn a thing or two from slavery.
Lewis, who played for the Baltimore Ravens for his entire 17-year career, recorded the video in his “prayer room” and is seen asking why there hasn’t been more uproar and rioting over the rising crime rates among Blacks, males in particular.
He ponders:
“I’m trying to find out if Black lives really matter, when in Chicago alone the murder rate has soared 72 percent in 2016, 88 percent in the first three months of 2016 compared to last year…I’m trying to figure out in my mind why no one is paying attention to Black men killing Black men.”
As the video continues to play his voice grows into a Martin Luther King, Jr.-ish cadence, spitting numbers on top of numbers about Chicago’s crime rates, but never really sharing where he got his information from.
In the perhaps the most questionable part of the video he screams:
“Lets stop killing Black folks, let’s take it way back to when we understood what slavery was all about. Slavery was about togetherness and understanding that we must overcome, together.”
Fun fact: Slavery was about free labor forced upon Africans taken from their home, and then disciplined with torture and sometimes murder.
He goes on to blame everything from music to movies to social media [he calls it “the devil’s playhouse”] as to why today’s children are “lost.”
To Lewis’ credit though, the entire video isn’t just him trying to preach. He admits that he is not a perfect man and that he has failures like everyone else. And he does come with some suggestions of what he would do if he were an elected official. He says that he would put barrels on street corners and give people 30 days to drop their illegal weapons inside and presumably, walk away, no strings attached. However, if after those 30 days have passed “Big Play Ray” catches you with your illegal weapon, he will lock you up for “25 years, minimum.” Let’s hope none of those weapons were snatched from that barrel that was just sitting outside on the corner.
He ends the video pleading to potential trigger pullers to check the pulse of the person they are about to kill.
This isn’t Ray Lewis’ first Facebook sermon. Last year he spoke his mind on the riots that broke out in Baltimore after police officers were arrested for killing Freddie Gray, an unarmed black man who was found dead in the back of a police van. He told the rioters to go home. As expected, social media suggested that he do the same.
Lewis is known for being passionate about what he believes, but do you agree with his message here?
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Photo: WENN.com
