Rapper-turned-actor-turned-producer Ice Cube, real name O’Shea Jackson, has called upon Hollywood to pay out reparations to black people for its alleged legacy of racism.
Speaking on “The Breakfast Club” radio show with Charlamagne tha God, Ice Cube said “all the studios” that contributed to black pain need to pay for what they have allegedly done.
“Virtually all the studios who contributed in our narrative, in our pain, in our misrepresentation, in stealing our history and giving it to white people for over a 100 years, so I think these studios that we know and love should kick in to a studio that’s ran by black people with no outside influences, and whose movies and projects are owned by those black people,” he said on the show.
Ice Cube said that Hollywood should give more ownership to black directors and writers who put their own projects together.
“Those black artists, those black directors and writers, and people who put the projects together should own the projects – and these studios, they can license the projects, the movies, or the TV shows or whatever, or they don’t have to,” he said. “We can put them on our own streaming services. I just think it’s a form of reparations from the entertainment industry if they all had to invest a certain amount of money into the studio each year as payment for all the damage they’ve done to black people.”
Addressing reparations more broadly, Ice Cube said that black people, which make up approximately 13% of the population, should get 13% of the pie. He also denounced the idea of incremental reform, a sentiment with which Charlamagne agreed.
“We catching hell no matter who in office, and we always have. So we need to think about who’s gonna support this plan, and try to better the whole country … try to do it in a [sic] across the board, broad manner, because … stomping out little fires here and there, it just ain’t gonna cut it,” he said. “We are 13% of this country — more, 13.5 — and we deserve 13.5% of the pie, straight up, across the board. …We’re not trying to get to reform. We need equality, straight up. … Why reform a system that was geared towards our demise? We need to be equal.”
“Yeah, f**k reform,” Charlamagne replied. “We gotta tear the whole system down; dismantle the whole mechanism of white supremacy.”
When Charlemagne asked if Ice Cube felt free in America as an accomplished, multi-millionaire black man, the rapper replied no.
“No. [There’s] no way to feel free in America because I’m connected to our people, you know, so I actually feel the pain,” Ice Cube said.
“You feel it in your bones,” he added. “That’s how I feel when I see something happen to one of us in the street. I feel it in my bones, and so I don’t feel free. I feel like that person. I feel like that can happen to me; that can happen to one of my sons; that can happen to my daughter; that can happen to my nephews, nieces, my father. That can happen to my mother.”
“How the hell are you going to feel free in this country just ‘cause you got money? That ain’t s**t,” he concluded.
As the protests over the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer have embroiled the nation, Ice Cube has faced criticism for his public defense of Minister Louis Farrakhan and the promotion of anti-Semitic memes.
As the Daily Wire reported:
On June 11, The Daily Beast noted Ice Cube’s recent and not-so-recent forays into anti-Semitism, reporting that he “offered up a dog-whistle to his 5.3 million Twitter followers: a Star of David enveloping a black cube. He posted the image above a quadriptych of similar black cubes in four places around the world: California, New York, Denmark, and Australia … The image in question, what those with vivid imaginations have come to call the ‘Black Cube of Saturn,’ has ties to the occult—the entirely unsubstantiated idea being that it’s a sign of chaos. Further, placing it inside a Star of David heavily implies that the Jewish people are stoking the flames.”
Just prior to the Star of David post, Ice Cube posted a meme showing a mural by the graffiti artist Mear One that The Daily Beast said was “clearly intended to be anti-Semitic.”
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