Here's What the Internet Thinks About the Idea that Rap Causes Racism

Well, well, an old, racist social-science-for-actual-dummies chestnut is finding yet another form of its eternal life thanks to our friends at Morning Joe, who decided to use their Wednesday morning camera time to opine about how black Americans are responsible for their own oppression—i.e. if a bunch of rich-ass white boys were caught chanting about how they’ll never let “n*ggers” join their dumb little frat, it’s maybe time for black people to think about what they’ve done to encourage this.

Speaking about how Waka Flocka cancelled an OU performance after watching the SAE video, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski suggested that maybe Waka Flocka is himself to blame. On his music:

It’s full of n-words, it’s full of f-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself.

I agree! And so does the internet. Because Morning Joe in just a few minutes has showed us that we’ve had it wrong this whole time. Rap isn’t an art form predicated on oppression—it’s not the expression, revision and reanimation of the powerful legacy of systematic white-on-black subjugation at the hands of the American state—it’s the cause of said oppression.

We’ve had it reversed! How dumb can we even be, sheeple?!

But I’ve got it now. That thing about how black Harvard grads have the same job callback rate as white state school grads, that’s because of rap music. Rap music is what causes white boys to chant in unison about how they don’t want any N-WORDS, HARD R in their Aryan clubhouse. Rap music is also what caused their parents to be at least tacitly racist enough to allow their kids to grow up thinking that these fraternity traditions are pretty chill unless someone gets that shit on camera. Rap music caused redlining and the FHA, rap music caused colored water fountains, rap music caused lynching, rap music caused the goddamn KKK. Rap music—and here we are at the tweets, babies—caused slavery, the highly productive and amoral economic system that a century and a half out still leaves its marks all over on the social structure of our country, most notably in the South.

Specifically, we mean these albums:

And the kicker:

This will get less funny throughout the day as non-black people start to “use their voices,” so let’s just enjoy it now.