Lil Wayne has a very strange reason for not supporting Black Lives Matter
LatestGrammy hip-hop winner Lil Wayne certainly had some stuff to say on his appearance on Nightline last night. Reporter Linsey Davis asked Lil Wayne how he felt about the Black Lives Matter movement, and the rapper responded by saying: “What is it? What does it mean?”
When asked if he felt connected to the movement at all, Wayne responded by saying, “”I don’t feel connected to a damn thing that ain’t got nothing to do with me.”
“I am a young rich black motherfucker,” Lil Wayne says, “if that don’t let you understand that black [bleeped] matter these days, I don’t know what it is.”
Lil Wayne’s history with the Black Lives Matter movement is complicated to say the least. In August, he led a crowd at the Lil Weezyana Festival in a “Black Lives Matter” chant, only to turn around the next month and completely backtrack his opinions on Fox’s sports talk show Undisputed where he said that “there’s no such thing as racism”
When asked about Colin Kaepernick’s decision to kneel during the national anthem at NFL games on Undisputed, Lil Wayne responded that he was going to “respect the man’s decision that’s all I can do,” but then quickly backed up to say he has “no opinion” and that someone had to “explain to me what was happening.”
That seems to be Lil Wayne’s mode of operating when asked this question: to pretend he doesn’t know what the movement means, and then to say that it doesn’t matter because he doesn’t feel he needs it. But as a young, very wealthy, very famous black man, Lil Wayne’s statements on the Black Lives Matter movement are important.
“My life matter,” Lil Wayne says at the end of his Nightline interview, “especially to my bitches.”
But to a lot of Wayne’s “bitches” his lack of perspective for any lives that aren’t his own, is just a little too far:
Kelsey McKinney is a culture staff writer for Fusion.