Lil Wayne has addressed the killing of George Floyd, the Minneapolis man who died with the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin on his neck. In a conversation with Fat Joe on Instagram Live on Friday, Wayne said, “If we want to place the blame on anybody, it should be ourselves for not doing more than what we think we’re doing.”
The controversial remarks came after a conversation about the time a police officer saved Wayne’s life. At the age of 12, the precocious rapper discharged a hand-gun and shot himself in the chest. Robert Hooper, an off-duty cop whom Weezy referred to as “Uncle Bob,” appeared on the scene. He said that, on the way to the hospital, Cooper “sat in the backseat with me and held me in his arms.”
At the conclusion of that story, Fat Joe asked Lil Wayne about the death of George Floyd. Weezy responded by saying,
“I think when we see these situations, I think we also have to understand that we have to get very specific, we have to get so specific. And what I mean by that is we have to stop viewing it with such a broad view, meaning we have to stop placing the blame on the whole force and the whole everybody of a certain race or everybody with a badge. We have to actually get into who that person is. And if we want to place the blame on anybody, it should be ourselves for not doing more than what we think we’re doing.”
Later, Lil Wayne explained why he rarely involved himself in politics. “Some people put a tweet out and they think they did something. Some people wear a shirt and they think they did something. What 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? So, if I ain’t about to do all that, then I ain’t about to do nothing. I’ll pray for ya.”
Finally, he suggested that many people expressing outrage haven’t done enough to educate themselves. “What we need to do is we need to learn about it more. If we wanna scream about something, know what we’re screaming about. If we wanna protest about something, know what we’re protesting about. Because if we wanna get into it, there’s a bunch of facts that we think we know that we don’t know. … We scream about things that, sometimes, they really ain’t true.”
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Check out the clip about George Floyd below, and scroll onwards for the full conversation with Fat Joe, which begins around the 48-minute mark.
Back in 2016, Lil Wayne was heavily criticized when he claimed “there was no such thing as racism.” He cited his large number of white fans as evidence.
Last night, Lil Wayne released an expanded deluxe edition of his most recent album, Funeral.
