Sitting down with Houston’s 97.9 The Box, Jeezy spoke at length about current protests over police violence in Ferguson, Missouri. Telling the station that he spoke with Louis Farrakhan about the police killing of Mike Brown and the ongoing aftermath, Jeezy also remarked on the power of celebrity in the context.
“I don’t know if I’m really supposed to say this or not but I got a call from Farrakhan yesterday about the whole incident, we talked for almost an hour,” the Seen It All rapper said. “That was my whole thing, like to him, I always knew how to take a role of leadership I just never had a cause. I don’t really think it’s just about money, everybody wanna be successful but when you’re still successful—you look at Oprah, you look at Tyler Perry, and these people—we associate success with money. So when you’re successful it’s cool to be about your money, but when things happen you gotta step up and be a leader. You gotta step up and handle your business. If you got a million followers or two million followers, these are two million people that’s gon’ listen, that’s gon’ tell two million other people what’s going on. And the whole thing [with Mike Brown], I spoke with his mother and everything. Even the whole thing with that, I was there. I was doing a show and I’m from that so I just didn’t feel comfortable touching that town without going to touch the people. All those things going on, I don’t wanna come through there and just give money and leave. Actually, to keep it a hundred, I didn’t want to do the show. I didn’t. I didn’t feel comfortable. It didn’t feel authentic. It didn’t feel real. But I get it ‘cause people wanna enjoy themselves but in the back of my mind, my son’s 18-years old. Even with the things that’s going on out there I just feel like it gotta come from up top. Barack Obama, our whole government gotta come in and shut that down ‘cause if somebody else gets hurt it’s gonna spread even farther.”
Reacting to the use of military equipment and weaponry in the city, Jeezy said simply of the initial tragedy, “there should be no reason for any law enforcement to shoot any unarmed person.”
“You got tanks in our neighborhood,” he said. “That’s like you riding down in North Houston and you see a tank. And you see the kids you grew up with fighting with these people as if they are soldiers and their our enemies. You got people in our neighborhoods with assault rifles. I’m hearing that he might have took some—I don’t know, I wasn’t there—but at the end of the day there should be no reason for any law enforcement to shoot any unarmed person.
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“It’s always strength in numbers,” he added. “There’s ways to do it without tearing down what we built or the same places that your neighbor gotta walk [to] and get milk for a baby…We gotta take that to their doorstep with real numbers and not leave until we get the answers. We just wanna know the situation, you gotta cooperate at some point.”
Explaining the public demand for more information on the killing, Jeezy said, “You gotta give us the reason why you felt that you had to take a human being’s life for any reason. Okay that’s cool if that’s what happened but why did you feel like it was that serious that you had to take—I mean, there’s stun-guns. There’s mace. There’s handcuffs. There’s so many different routes and the reason I think why the city is in such an uproar because this is the same community that watched this kid grow up to eighteen and get ready to go to college.”
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