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Rapper Killer Mike said that white people should have worked to address racial and economic inequalities long before recent police killings of unarmed black people focused national attention on the issue.
“If white people are just now discovering that it’s bad for black or working class people in America, they’re a lot more blind than I thought. They’re a lot more choosing to be ignorant than I thought,” he said Tuesday during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Colbert had asked the hip-hop activist if the shootings have changed anything in our national dialogue.
“The same problems that we’re discussing today, we discussed in 1990, 1980, 1970 and 1960,” Killer Mike said.
The rapper also said that it’s easy to bridge the racial gap in opportunities, and told Colbert he often encourages white college students to become mentors.
“Get outside the college environment. Find a child who is marginal or doing exceptional in school, who is a minority who doesn’t look like you — not of the same religion, not of the same background. Help that child matriculate into college, help them by being a big brother or big sister by mentoring them,” Killer Mike said.
“Don’t give them gifts. Don’t make yourself feel good, like, ‘Hey, I gave them a new pair of sneakers.’ Teach them the path you were taught to become a successful human being.”
Killer Mike also favorably compared Democratic hopeful Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign to Martin Luther King Jr.’s more radical mission in his later years. His support for Sanders is nothing new — he’s already endorsed the Vermont senator’s candidacy for the Democratic nomination, and the two ate soul food together in Atlanta.
Sanders “cares for lives that don’t look like his,” Killer Mike said, pointing out qualities the candidate shares with King.
“Dr. King, in the last two years of his life, talked about a poor people’s campaign, organizing unions on behalf of poor workers, organizing against a war machine that was perpetuating violence in Vietnam,” he said.
“Bernie Sanders is the only politician who has consistently, for 50 years, taken that social justice platform into politics. … We can elect someone who cares about poor people, who cares about women, gay, black rights, cares about lives that don’t look like his. This opportunity in history is not going to come again in another 20 years.”
In February, The Huffington Post is launching a podcast, hosted by Killer Mike, on Reconstruction. If you know anything about Reconstruction, you’ve probably been told that it was a brief moment of ill-advised revenge that the North took on the South just after the Civil War. But the real history of Reconstruction is one of great hope and promise mixed with tremendous violence. Sign up here to get an email when the podcast goes live.
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