Minister Johnathan Gentry, a staff member at West Angeles Church of God in Christ, says black leaders should look in the mirror before they lecture others on race relations.
"I'm doing your job. I'm doing [Attorney General] Eric Holder's job, because I'm not going to tell a police department and nation to change when we're still tore up from the floor up," Gentry said Tuesday on
Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto."
Gentry, who is black, said he has been accused of being against his own culture and race. A video of him lecturing Ferguson, Missouri, protesters in August drew nationwide attention.
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"I am only telling you to look in the mirror before you want to point fingers at anyone else," Gentry said.
The minister echoed others who have said recently that many of the problems young black males have with police stem from the high crime rate in black communities.
"I'm going to be like
Charles Barkley and say this is disgusting because you want everything else around you changed except yourself," Gentry said. "That is no way to survive."
The minister told Cavuto he is acting on God's authority in the statements he is making, and disputed that the Rev. Al Sharpton is acting under that same authority because, Gentry said, "God is love."
Sharpton is instead using hate from his past to pour those same feelings into "an innocent generation," he said.
Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican just elected as the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, later told Cavuto that he has reached out to members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the Urban League in his home state after the police killing of young black man Michael Brown, 18, in August.
Scott said that he, too, was an at-risk teenager and found success only after rejecting negative influences.
"Hard work creates your own luck," Scott said.
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