Axle Whitehead Defends Tone-Deaf BLM Post, Says ‘Black On Black Violence’ Is The ‘Big Killer’
His former 'Video Hits' co-host Faustina Agolley had previously called out his yellow 'Asian Lives Matter' tile post.
Axle Whitehead has doubled down on his ‘All Lives Matter’ rhetoric with an Instagram post where he says that ‘Black on Black’ violence is the “biggest killer”, after his former Video Hits co-host Faustina Agolley criticised his post of a yellow ‘Asian Lives Matter’ tile.
Whitehead, who first gained fame by making the top twenty of the first Australian Idol season, posted the tile in a now-deleted post last week, which riffed off the Blackout Tuesday trend.
Agolley publicly responded by asking Whitehead to take down the post, as well as having a private conversation with Whitehead which she later shared part of with News.com.au.
Whitehead responded by saying it was a “joke” and that an Asian person had died in the US protests. He then linked to a post by conservative commentator Candace Owens who cites ‘statistics’ that 55 per cent of fatal US police brutality is against white people, while only 27 per cent is against Black people.
Let alone the questionable cherry-picking math here, this statistic ignores that white people make up 76 per cent of the US population, and Black people 13 per cent. Police brutality, as the Black Lives Matter protests states, is disproportionately used against Black people.
Agolley then shared these posts on her Instagram stories, writing, “Axle been down with you for a while but thank you for showing me who you are. And if you ever wanna communicate, take a couple of years to get through the reading list circulating about Black lives and Asian lives before ever getting in contact again.”
On Friday, Whitehead posted a quote by libertarian economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell where he states that racism is propped up by those who call things racist — rather than, among many other things, the ‘free market’ economics that left racism to be sorted out by the markets while tearing apart and selling off public resources to make education and public health increasingly inequitable.
In his comment underneath, Whitehead says he was critiquing “virtue signalling”, and implying that the Black Lives Matter movement is hypocritical for not protesting ‘black on black violence’.
“This week I was publicly shamed and labelled “a racist” because I made an on the nose joke about the virtue signalling I saw online,” he wrote.
“I also shared a stat in regards to deaths in police custody, posted by @realcandaceowens (check her out), also quoted in the Washington Post, which was quickly scoffed off as a “fake tweet”. The biggest killer to the black community is black on black violence, that’s a fact. Where’s the BLM movement then? Pointing out a fact and not being black, does that make me a racist?”
“No life should be taken unjustly, whether it be that of a criminal, a 77 yr old cop, a 5 yr old girl or the 9 others killed during these riots. I stand by what I said. All Lives Matter. Let’s hope for a better future.”
Speaking to the Daily Telegraph (via News.com.au), Agolley expressed her disappointment with his follow-up statement.
“There’s a lot of Aussies in a space of learning about racism on a deeper level right now while black people in this country are hurting and wanting genuine solidarity, and then there’s Axle who wants to take his opinions further,” she said.
“He took a deliberate choice not to get behind black lives and take a shot at Asians. I called him in and he didn’t care about what he did, he only cared about being called on it. One of the ways we can have meaningful change is when we call in our family, mates and co-workers when they act up, no matter how uncomfortable it may be.”
Whitehead currently has a reoccurring role on Neighbours, and is an R U Ok? ambassador, though he is not currently listed as one on the charity’s website. Junkee has reached out for clarification from R U Ok?.