Rapper Joyner Lucas recently released a powerful music video for his song titled I’m Not Racist and the video has since then gone viral on social media outlets. Feedback is mixed and if you see the video it would be quite easy to understand why. It is truly the conversation on racism that people feel too uncomfortable to discuss. Joyner just puts what everyone, or at least majority, are thinking on both sides, right before us with this skin-crawling, explicit conversation between a black and white male. Nobody ever seems to want to talk about racism. Well, here it is.
The video opens with a white man wearing a “Make American Great Again” hat throwing it all out there and telling us all the problems he has with black people as well as typical racist remarks and misconceptions.
N***** kneelin’ on the field, that’s a flag down
How dare you try to make demands for this money?
You gon’ show us some respect, you gon’ stand for this country, n*****!
He goes on with the double-standard of who can use the “N” word, that African Americans are lazy, how black people should not be affected by slavery- something they were not there for, his hate for the recent kneelings before the American flag in protest of police brutality and the overall mistreatment of black people, and that one thing every one is sick of – claiming to not be racist only because you know a black person, but you don’t really know that person. Listening past the common racist misconceptions that Joyner is bringing awareness to, I could not help but hear some valid points being made by him: the lack of black fathers in their children’s lives, the selling of drugs, sagging. I was lost for words while he was speaking, but every word he spoke was in reality another person’s thoughts. Let that sink in.
The tables turned once it was the black male’s time to respond.
Screaming “All Lives Matter”
Is a protest to my protest, what kind of s*** is that?
The young man puts an end to racist generalizations and stereotypes that were just thrown at him and gives reasonable validations.
In all honesty, this young man answered questions a lot of white people are too afraid to ask. On the other hand, the “Make America Great Again” hat wearer helped us see some fault in the African American community but also made us see what we are dealing with and what we are up against. Hearing the racist remarks that many are subject to is still hurtful and hard to watch, but it’s real and people need to realize that. There are people who feel exactly how the white man in this video does and that is an issue. What I love about this conversation is that it put everything out there. Everything that people, black and white, are too uncomfortable to say was said. The video ended with a hug between the two, but once the screen goes black, it’s up to us to work towards a solution to a problem that a hug will not fix in real life.