Rapper Lil Baby got into a heated debate with Rolling Stone writer Charles Holmes, after the journalist insisted, “Black people can’t be racist.”
The 25-year-old rapper, who topped the U.S. Billboard 200 with his second album My Turn earlier this year, was discussing police corruption and systemic racism with Holmes.
The two men discussed a line in his song “The Bigger Picture,”, “Corrupted police been the problem where I’m from / But I’d be lying if I said it was all of them.”
Holmes said there can’t be “good police in a fundamentally flawed and racist system”.
But Lil Baby disagreed: “Just ’cause you work in a racist system doesn’t mean you racist.”
“Damn near every system that got a job is a racist system. You know what I mean?” said the rapper, real name Dominique Armani Jones.
“CEOs be like old white people. You never know, they got to be some kind of racist ’cause at some certain age… that was the way of life almost. So I almost feel like all these corporations or whatnot may be racist. And black people are racist too.”
“Black people can’t be racist,” the writer said in disagreement, prompting Baby to respond, “Why? Racist means to be just to your race.”
Holmes explained: “Well, the thing about racism is you would have to have some type of power, and Black people, historically speaking, don’t have any power to be racist. We can be prejudiced.”
“To me, a racist is someone who treats a different race than theirs a different way than they would treat theirs,” the “Drip Too Hard” rapper said.
“I feel like if you’re a black person and you treat all black people one way and all white people one way, you’re racist. I’m not a racist, so I give a white person a chance to talk and actually we get into it before I can say I don’t like you or not.”
He added: “I feel the same way about a black person. You ain’t gon’ be my buddy just ’cause you’re black. Just straight up.”
In unrelated news, Lil Baby dropped aspiring rapper 42 Dugg from his 4PF label after the rapper dropped what sounds like a homosexual reference on a track.
It sounds like the rapper says: “I was out here suckin’ d**k / I was tryna pay the rent.”
But after the backlash on Twitter, 42 Dugg clarified the lyrics, tweeting: “HOES OUT HERE SUCKIN D**K… I WAS TRYNA PAY HER RENT.”
But fans aren’t convinced that’s what he said on the track. Listen below and decide for yourself (if you care).
