It’s great when your favorite entertainer addresses situations that are important to their fans. There’s nothing worst than supporting someone and making them richer only to find out that they don’t really care about the issues that affect you.
Rappers Lil Wayne and Fat Joe had a very necessary IG live conversation about the recent developments surrounding the George Floyd case in Minnesota. When Fat Joe asked Lil Wayne about his thoughts on the situation, he had a very interesting response.
“I think when we see these situations, I think we also have to understand that we have to get very specific,” Lil Wayne said. “What I mean by that, we have to stop viewing it from such a broad view, meaning we have to stop placing the blame on the whole force and the whole everybody of a certain race, everybody with a badge. We have to actually get into who that person is.”
Lil Wayne makes a point, well sort of. Maybe he is suggesting that we have to be careful to not generalize all people by one person’s choices. But, what Lil Wayne fails to realize is that the entire police system in America needs reform.
It’s not a Minnesota thing, but not targeting the “whole force” is to ignore the Rodney Kings (California), Eric Garners (New York), Trayvon Martins (Florida), Philando Castiles (Minnesota), Michael Lee Marshalls (Colorado), Freddie Grays (Maryland), Sandra Blands (Texas), Ahmaud Arberys (Georgia) and George Floyds (Minnesota), to name a few.
See: A Growing List Of Police Violence Against Black People In The U.S.
These incidents are not in specific places but are running rampant all over the U.S. One thing that’s for sure is that black people are specifically being targeted.
Furthermore, Mr. Carter should do some research because the details of Officer Derek Chauvin’s career are available on the Internet as we speak. He has 18 accounts of complaints on his record. Lil Wayne, who once was an inspirational icon with motivational music, continued to point the finger at the black community.
“If we want to place the blame on anybody, it should be ourselves for not doing more than what we think we’re doing,” he said.
There’s no question that things in the black community do indeed need to be revised. To deny that is to pretend that people are perfect. But, that argument is derisory in discourse at a time when the focus should be on charging the police officers responsible for these crimes.
Saying that police should not be arrested because the black community needs work is not only an unnecessary agitation, but it also deflects from the racial issues at hand.
In addition, the sentiment doesn’t acknowledge what put the black community in its current state in the first place. Systemic barriers and a lack of resources are some of the main derivatives of a system built on holocaustic free labor.
“The reason people always ask me like, ‘Why you don’t say this? Why you don’t do that?’ Is because what else am I going to do after that?,” Lil Wayne continued. “Some people put a tweet out and think they did something. Some people wear a shirt and think they did something. I mean, [what are you] gonna do after that? Did you actually help the person? Did you actually help the family? Did you actually go out there and do something? If I ain’t about to do all that, then I ain’t about to do nothing. I’ll pray for you.”
Does Lil Wayne really pray? And if he does, would he pray for us? For some reason, that “I’ll pray for you” sounded more like an “Oh well, your problem, not mine” and that dismissive attitude is not what is needed in a time of distress and action.
Summarizing the words of Malcolm X, at this moment in time the scared negroes must take a seat. For those with the passion and power to take action, who is Lil Wayne to question the routes in which these people of action decide to take to express their concern or frustration.
A “social media activist” that shares a tweet or wears a shirt is doing way more in comparison to Lil Wayne’s resolution to not do anything at all. When people decide to take to the streets in protest, they are further ridiculed by their own community, usually by people like Lil Wayne.
Yet, these same people are comfortable with the status quo as they tirelessly slave away for the dwindling U.S. dollar. They don’t want to rock the boat because it makes them uncomfortable. The best advice for these scary, comfortable human beings is to get out of the way of the people that have passion and purpose.
If Lil Wayne doesn’t have the courage to break out from puppet mode and address the officers as harshly as he addresses his own race, then maybe he should just exclude himself from the conversation.
“We need to learn about it more,” Lil Wayne said. “If we want to scream about something, know what we screaming about. We want to protest about something, know what we’re protesting about. Because if you want to get into it’s a bunch of facts that we think we know about that we don’t know.”
When Lil Wayne says these things he speaks as if he’s talking for the entire black community. In reality, he is really talking about himself. He needs to learn more about why the protests are going on.
This quote brings into remembrance his total disregard for the Black Lives Matter movement when he had a very arrogant and dismissive response. He angrily responded that because he was a young, black rich motherf*cker, his life matters.
The silver lining, at least Lil Wayne has an opinion. There’s some celebrities who are as quiet as Little Bo Peep right now. When you have celebrities who aren’t black (Adam22, Cardi B etc.) responding to social issues before black entertainers do, then that’s a problem!
