Rapper Lupe Fiasco tells it like it is in a powerful and articulate open letter in the wake of the Charleston church shooting.
In response to the brutal slayings of nine people in a historically black Charleston church, Lupe Fiasco took to Instagram to address the racist overtones of the crime and the deluded manifesto attributed to alleged shooter Dylann Roof.
The eloquent letter, penned by Fiasco, directly calls into question the superiority of any individual based upon their ethnicity, while forwarding the concept of human “regularity.”
“There is nothing about you biologically or physically that denotes an innate mode of supremacy. For that matter there is also nothing about you psychologically, philosophically, cognitively, academically, socially, architecturally, culturally or even financially that signifies a higher position above any other group. And to be diplomatic there is nothing about you that denotes innate inferiority as well. So what you really are is something in the middle. You are regular,” Fiasco wrote, strongly rebutting many of the suggestions made in the alleged killer’s manifesto.
To ensure that people understood this wasn’t simply a slight towards any ethnicity, he went on to make clear the point that our common regularity is where our differences shine through in innovations that are continually being built upon and constructed.
“Things are created in collaboration and in tandem with other cultures, knowledge structures and movements and more important, People. I mean if those Muslims didn't catalog all that Greek philosophy for research we might not even know who Plato was,” referencing the Golden Age of Islam, which continued to progress the body of world knowledge as the Western world slipped into the Dark Ages.
The Chicago rappers most poignant words come when he states,
“We are supreme as a spectrum of colors in collaboration.”
Fiasco breaks down this statement by using Apple as an example of the interconnected of our world.
“Sure Steve Jobs was white. But the guy who built the computer was probably Chinese. And the girl who wrote the programs for the computer is probably from Mumbai. And the raw materials that were used to make it where probably first pulled out of the ground by somebody in South Africa.”
The three part letter, featuring images of accused killer Roof, ends with a final salute from Fiasco.
“In closing white regularity (the race formerly know as white supremacy) I myself on behalf of my own black regularity salute you.”
Read the open letter to White Supremacy below.
Jay Syrmopoulos is an investigative journalist, free thinker, researcher, and ardent opponent of authoritarianism. He is currently a graduate student at University of Denver pursuing a masters in Global Affairs. Jay's work has previously been published on BenSwann.com and WeAreChange.org. You can follow him on Twitter @sirmetropolis, on Facebook at Sir Metropolis and now on tsu.
