Reacting on camera to the news of 12-year old Tamir Rice being gunned down by police in Cleveland, Ohio last month, rapper Immortal Technique quickly wondered out loud why growing instances of police brutality and killings are isolated to poor communities of color.
“My question for you or maybe the audience too is, why do you think police can do that there?” he asked. “Why don’t they do that in rich neighborhoods? Is it because they think they A can’t get away with it? Is it because that White life is worth more than Black life? Rich life worth more than poor life? What is it? I think when you ask yourself questions like that, even if you’re a sceptic, even you’re a person that thinks Darren Wilson is right, you don’t wanna ask yourself questions like that. You’re gonna end up getting answers that don’t fit with your narrative of the world and society.
“Is justice in America only for rich people then?” he added. “Obviously there’s a huge divide in how people think the police perceive so-called minorities even though we’re a majority in the world. We’ve been just trained to think we’re a minority to politically minimize us. If we consider that then we have to wonder, not just about that specific scenario, but all of them in general.”
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Addressing the public anger and protests against recent cases of police not being prosecuted for the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, Technique added his own public support for protests around the country and world.
“I’m not gonna shut up no more,” he said. “I’m done trying to placate or be nice to people. I’m telling them exactly how I feel and exactly how it is. I’m not doing this anymore. I just always tell people, ‘Don’t pop shit when you riding dirty.’ That’s the number one rule of the day. If you gonna sit there and say, ‘Oh, I’m standing up for human rights, civil rights,’ and then you got a pound of molly on you and God-knows what, packets of molly, a pound of weed in the trunk. And then there’s somebody hand in the glove compartment, you should probably shut the fuck up and clean your house up before you invite people over to tell them your political opinion. That’s dangerous. You don’t wanna expose yourself. I definitely wanna send a very big shout out, not just to the people in Ferguson that are protesting, but the people around the country, wherever they are, in Chicago, in New York, in Atlanta, down in Florida. I know people out in the Midwest, West Coast. And then all around the world. We all appreciate that support and we think that that’s a necessity to keep more young people connected so that we know that this is a struggle that represents all of us.”
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