On Saturday, the rapper Killer Mike—one half of the hip-hop duo Run the
Jewels and a known comrade of Senator Bernie Sanders—appeared in a nearly
seven-minute video for NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s frenzied and bombastic
television channel. The host and activist Colion Noir introduced him as
somebody who “knows how guns can solve the problems society faces.” The
timing of the video was particularly goading, circulating, as it did,
while hundreds of thousands of students marched to demand more stringent
gun-control laws. (Mike has said that it was filmed a week earlier, and that
he had nothing to do with the timing of its release.) He admitted to
Noir—who recently mocked the Parkland survivors, also on NRATV, telling
them “no one would know your names” had their teachers and classmates
not been massacred—that he had forbidden his own children from
participating in any actions associated with the #NeverAgain movement:
“I told my kids on the school walkout, I love you, if you walk out that school, walk out my house. It’s that simple. We
are a gun-owning family.”
Killer Mike, who was born Michael Render, in 1975, in Atlanta, has
consistently expressed distrust of any American institution infected by
systemic racism. The game, he suggests, is too rigged. “I don’t trust
the church or the government, a Democrat, Republican, a pope, a bishop
or those other men,” he said in 2015, while introducing
Sanders at a campaign
rally in Georgia. Mike has self-identified, politically, simply as “a
capitalist,” but he liked Sanders, he said, because of his promise to
restore the Voting Rights Act, prioritize education, and “end this
illegal war on drugs that disproportionately targets minorities and the
poor.” (During Sanders’s campaign, he and Mike openly disagreed about an
assault-weapons ban, which Sanders has long supported.)
The pro-gun argument that Mike presents to Noir centers, essentially, on
the idea that black Americans can’t trust law enforcement to protect
them, and that all citizens should be prepared to retaliate against
inevitable violence. (He does not give much credence to the optimistic
idea that violence itself could be eradicated—or at least slowed—by
removing weapons from the streets.) He also decried the imbalance of
attention, acknowledged and addressed at the March for Our Lives,
allotted to young black victims, alluding, in a sympathetic way, to the
N.R.A. spokesperson Dana Loesch’s seething remarks that “crying white mothers are ratings gold.”
Mike has rapped about most of these things before. He has a rubbery,
blustery voice—melodious and playful, but trenchant. On “Lie, Cheat,
Steal,” from 2014’s “Run
the Jewels 2,” he suggests that violence can be an effective corrective
to violence:
And I love Dr. King but violence might be necessary
Cause when you live on M.L.K. and it gets very scary
You might have to pull your A.K., send one to the cemetery
Still, for a rapper who has steadfastly refused to align himself with
organizations that he deems problematic to now brazenly stump for the
N.R.A.—while wearing an “End Racism” shirt—feels both perplexing and
deeply hypocritical. The N.R.A. has never been particularly supportive
of black Americans’ right to bear arms; in fact, some see the
organization’s continued success as a reaction to it. In 1967, when
armed members of the Black Panther Party gathered inside the California
State Assembly chamber to protest the Mulford Act, a bill that would
ultimately ban the open carrying of firearms in California, the N.R.A.
instead backed the governor, Ronald Reagan, who eventually signed the
bill into law; decades later, the N.R.A. also conspicuously failed to
speak out about the death of Philando Castile, the thirty-two-year-old
licensed gun owner who was murdered by a panicked police officer. (The
N.R.A. said that it refused to advocate on Castille’s behalf because of his
recreational marijuana use.) In 2016, following Trump’s Inauguration,
Chuck Holton, who co-hosts a show on NRATV called “Frontlines,”
tweeted,
“Okay! Party’s over. Let’s get busy scrubbing Obama’s mocacchino stain
off of America!”
Further Reading
New Yorker writers on the March for Our Lives.
Killer Mike’s dismissiveness of the #NeverAgain protests also feels
inconsistent. In 2014, on the night that a grand jury decided not to
indict the police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael
Brown, in Ferguson, Mike delivered a powerful statement in support of
protest. “I would like to give all thoughts and prayers to the people
who are out there peacefully protesting,” he said. “I also give thoughts
and prayers for the people who could not hold their anger in because
riots are only the language of the unheard.” He was quoting Martin
Luther King, Jr.,’s 1968 speech, “The Other
America,” in which King
describes how the routinely disenfranchised might “feel that they have
no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get
attention.” But nonviolence, King insisted, remains “the most potent
weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of
view.”
On Sunday night, in a two-part video, Mike apologized—sort of—for NRATV’s decision to release the video when it did. “I am your ally, young
people,” he said. “I love and respect you all.” Whether or not black
Americans can be reasonably expected to trust or rely on police officers
is an issue the nation needs to grapple with, and urgently: last
Sunday, in Sacramento, Stephon Clark, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old,
was shot to death by cops who thought that the cell phone in his hands was a gun. But surely the question would be better addressed via an
outlet not sponsored by the N.R.A., an organization that every American
has endless reasons to be wary of.
Sourse: newyorker.com
