Lil Wayne doesn’t connect with Black Lives Matter: ‘I ain’t no ... politician’
Lil Wayne doesn’t connect with the Black Lives Matter movement — or perhaps he doesn’t connect with being asked about the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It just sounds weird. I don’t know that you put a label on it. It’s not a name, it’s not ‘whatever, whatever.’ It’s someone got shot by police for a [messed] up reason,” the 34-year-old rapper told interviewer Lindsey Davis on the most recent “Nightline.”
“I am a young, black, rich [man],” he said. “If that don’t let you know that America understands black [people] matter these days, I don’t know what it is. Don’t come at me with that dumb ... My life matters.”
Davis pushed further, asking Wayne if he separated himself from the movement.
“I don’t feel connected to a damn thing that ain’t got nothing to do with me,” he said. “If you do, you’re crazy ... you.”
The interview, which ended with Weezy saying, “I ain’t no … politician,” and walking off “angrily,” according to Davis, probably needs to be seen in the context of a moment at a show in August when he went into a “black lives matter” chant that seemed less than serious, and a September sit-down on Fox Sports’ “Undisputed” where he said that while he knows racism exists, he’s never experienced it personally.
“They wouldn’t want to ask me that,” Wayne told host Skip Bayless after being asked to comment on U.S. race relations in general. “They wouldn’t want my answer to represent it.”
“Because God knows I have been nothing but blessed, my whole path ... I have never — ‘never’ is a strong word — never dealt with racism and I’m glad I didn’t have to. I don’t know if it’s because of my blessings, I don’t know, but it is my reality. I have to say not only that I thought it was over, I still believe it’s over, but obviously, it isn’t.”
His children, he told Bayless, are what matter to him: “That’s my nation, that’s my flag, that’s my world, that’s my protest, that’s my don’t protest, that’s my everything, that’s all that matters, those four kids, to me.”
Follow Christie D’Zurilla on Twitter @theCDZ.
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