Rapper Lil Yachty calls Black Lives Matter a 'scam,' BLM issues blistering response
Rapper Lil Yachty told cooking show host and influencer Quenlin Blackwell that Black Lives Matter (BLM) "was literally a scam" on an episode of her popular YouTube show.
Blackwell, who hosts "Feeding Starving Celebrities" on the video-sharing platform and talks to various famous guests, asked Yachty how much he's spent on charitable contributions so far this year. When the rapper mentioned that the year had just started, the host asked what contributions he'd made over the previous two years, also asking if BLM was one of the causes he's donated to.
"What about the year before last year?" asked Blackwell.
Yachty responded, saying, "Well, that year, yeah, that's a good year. It's just blurry because I be doing so much."
Black Lives Matter Global Circling The Drain As It Runs Out Of Cash: Report
The host immediately followed up his response, asking, "BLM? Since you want to be so Black power?"
Read On The Fox News App
"BLM is a scam," Yachty responded, to the shock of the host.
"Clip that! Send it to the f------ news!" Blackwell responded.
Yachty, who has 5.3 million followers on social media platform X, expanded on his statement, explaining to the host why he believes the social justice group is a "scam."
"BLM was literally a scam. They had bought mansions, and you probably wouldn't know anything about it because you don't care about Black people, and don't follow Black news," Yachty jokingly asserted.
Blackwell, who is African-American herself, told the rapper that she does "care about Black people," and that she's "literally the most pro-Black person in this room."
'Love Is Blind' Star Sara Carton Rejects Ben Mezzenga At The Altar Over Views On Religion, Black Lives Matter
BLM came under fire in 2022 after their lavish home purchase was exposed by New York Magazine. According to the report, "The California property was purchased for nearly $6 million in cash in October 2020 with money that had been donated to BLMGNF (Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation)."
The report caused the activist organization to respond on Twitter.
"There have been a lot of questions surrounding recent reports about the purchase of Creator's House in California," the Black Lives Matter official Twitter account posted.
"Despite past efforts, BLMGNF recognizes that there is more work to do to increase transparency and ensure transitions in leadership are clear," it added.
In subsequent tweets, BLM called a flurry of reports looking into the group's finances "inflammatory and speculative" and blamed them for "causing harm." The reports "do not reflect the totality of the movement," the organization claimed.
At the time, BLMGNF board member Shalomyah Bowers emailed a statement to the New York Magazine reporter claiming that the organization purchased the property "with the intention for it to serve as housing and studio space for recipients of the Black Joy Creators Fellowship," a program that was reportedly announced the next day as providing "recording resources and dedicated space for Black creatives to launch content online and in real life focused on abolition, healing justice, urban agriculture and food justice, pop culture, activism, and politics."
Click Here For More Coverage Of Media And Culture
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation responded to Fox News Digital's request for comment on Yachty's claims with strong words for the rapper: "It's clear Lil Yachty has been drinking the white supremacist ideology Kool-Aid. His comments are wrong. They are misinformed, unoriginal, and crafted to please the same people who profit from Black suffering."
The statement continued, "The real scam isn't Black Lives Matter. It is watching Black artists with massive platforms recycle the same tired attacks on Black movements while ignoring the actual systems killing us. Black Lives Matter has supported Black families who have lost loved ones to police violence. We have built programs, funded mutual aid, and fought in courtrooms and on the streets to protect our people."
Fox News Digital's Kristine Parks and Ronn Blitzer contributed to this report.Original article source: Rapper Lil Yachty calls Black Lives Matter a 'scam,' BLM issues blistering response
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
28 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Nick and Vanessa Lachey Celebrate Son Camden, 12, Going to Middle School with Special Hawaiian Tradition: 'Here We Come'
Vanessa and Nick Lachey's son Camden is going to middle school The NCIS Hawai'i star shared adorable snaps of her family of five, including a snap of her son sporting a stack of lei, via her Instagram Stories, commemorating the special occasion In addition to their son, the couple shares son Phoenix and daughter BrooklynVanessa and Nick Lachey's son is off to middle school! The NCIS: Hawai'i star, 44, recently shared snaps via her Instagram Stories of her family of five celebrating her son Camden, 12, graduating from elementary school. In one picture, Vanessa can be seen kissing the tween on the cheek, as he adorns a stack of lei around his neck sent to him by his aunts from the Aloha State. In the other picture, the proud mom posed with her husband and fellow Love Is Blind host, 51, and their three children. The Lacheys were all smiles as they surrounded the soon-to-be middle schooler. "Middle school here we come!" Vanessa wrote in text over the second picture. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Vanessa and Nick are parents to three children: sons Phoenix, 8, and Camden, and daughter Brooklyn, 10. As a mom of three, things may get chaotic and busy, but Vanessa knows it all comes with the territory. 'We all have fails daily and that's okay. It doesn't mean you're a bad parent,' she told PEOPLE in April 2019. 'We all are constantly struggling daily, but that's also the beautiful side of parenthood.' The mom of three isn't fully ready for her kids to become teenagers. During a Friday, Feb. 14 interview with Entertainment Tonight alongside her husband, she was asked how she's feeling about her oldest son becoming a teenager this year. As soon as the question was read, Vanessa began to get emotional. 'That one's going to get me,' Vanessa said, tearing up. 'It's going to get me because you know that this has been happening in the last couple months.' 'They're growing! I can't answer this question, I have on fake eyelashes,' she continued. 'I'm not nervous about the next phase, I'm excited. Everybody who has older kids talks about how it gets better. I'm hanging onto them still being little. And they're still little now. So. I'm going to cry.' is now available in the Apple App Store! Download it now for the most binge-worthy celeb content, exclusive video clips, astrology updates and more! Vanessa then became teary as her husband said, "I feel like I'm in Jerry Maguire when Roy Firestone makes Cuba Gooding Jr. cry. You're not going to get me to cry, Roy!' 'It's actually really… it's such a beautiful question because I love — I know you do too — we love our children and we love watching them grow," Vanessa explained. "But maybe it's because NCIS:Hawai'i was cancelled and I was so sad. We were so sad we left Hawaii. That was our dream. And the silver lining to that is it's been able to give us so much time with our kids.' Although she noted that her older son still acts like a kid for now, Vanessa added there's so much she's excited to experience with her kids once they get a little older. 'Camden is just…he's 12 but he's still like a 12-year-old boy. He watches Bluey with his brother and sister and they're just still kids," the star said. "And I'm like really holding onto it because at some point it does change ... but I'm excited about girlfriends and boyfriends and driving and whatever.' Read the original article on People
Yahoo
30 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Ari Aster's ‘Eddington' Sharply Divides Cannes: Star Pedro Pascal Defends a Western About ‘Our Worst Fears' Amid Lockdown
When writer/director Ari Aster stood up for the ovation after the Cannes premiere of his divisive 2020-set Western 'Eddington' (July 16, A24), he said, 'I feel very privileged to be here. This is a dream come true. Thank you so much for having me. And, I don't know, sorry?' Indeed, festival attendees have been fiercely divided by his 145-minute portrait of a fictional New Mexico town wracked by COVID, BLM, ACAB, you-name-it-2020-buzz-concept during the darkest season of American lives in recent memory. Joaquin Phoenix (Aster's 'Beau Is Afraid') plays a conservative sheriff who decides to run against his Gavin Newsom-esque, pro-masks-and-testing adversary, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), in the local mayoral election. More from IndieWire The Cannes 2025 Films So Far Most Likely to End Up in the Oscar Race 'Imago' Review: Chechen Documentary Explores a Filmmaker's Conflicted Return to His Roots Meanwhile, at home, Phoenix's character Joe Cross is in a quarantine bubble with his hysteria-addled wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her far-right conspiracy-obsessed mother Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), the type for whom hydroxychloroquine was presumably a panacea. But Joe's campaign is all anti-masks, anti-vax, with the threat of cult leader Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler) also posing a challenge to his political and personal life. The film has sparked massive debates up and down the Croisette since premiering Friday night, with the starriest red carpet thus far and a press conference Saturday afternoon featuring Aster with his actors Phoenix, Pascal (in a sleeveless top), Stone (in a pixie haircut, her hair growing back presumably after shaving it off for Yorgos Lanthimos' upcoming 'Bugonia'), and Michael Ward, who plays Phoenix's next-in-command. IndieWire has talked to people who loved or hated the film, with rarely any opinion in between and certainly never without a strong response of some kind from anyone — whether out of boredom or raptures over Aster's in-your-face replay of our worst COVID-times memories. 'Eddington' could be a tough sell for audiences unwilling to be submersed again in summer 2020 and all the chaos and anxieties it erupted. Other pundits I've spoken to defend 'Eddington' as a necessary social satire that mocks and derides the panic of that year, while encapsulating it all into one movie as never before. IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote in his rave review that 'few other filmmakers would have the chutzpah required' to pull this movie off, 'and we should probably all be grateful that none of them have tried.' 'It's very scary to participate in a movie that speaks to issues like this,' Pascal said at the press conference. 'It's far too intimidating a question for me to address. I'm not informed enough. I want people to be safe and protective. I want very much to be on the right side of history.' 'Eddington' indeed takes shots at both sides of the aisle, roasting liberal posturing in the form of social justice youth like Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), who posts TikToks about James Baldwin and rants about having any position at all on 'stolen land.' Phoenix's sheriff character, meanwhile, could only be wrought from the era of Trump, as he rails against mask mandates and is suspicious of the George Floyd-inspired protests shaking up his community. At one point, he swaggers into a grocery store with the pompousness of Western's most classic, gun-on-the-hip cowboys. Pascal added, 'I felt like [Aster] wrote something that was all our worst fears as that lockdown experience was already a fracturing society. This was building toward an untethered sense of reality. There is a point of not going back. I was overwhelmed by that fear, and it's wonderful that it was confirmed by Ari.' Aster, whose latest feature is a hairpin departure from the genre thrills and chills of films like 'Hereditary' and 'Midsommar' and is far from the spirit of intrusive-thought-induced weirdness of 'Beau Is Afraid,' added, 'I wrote this movie in a state of fear and anxiety. I wanted to try and pull back and show what it feels like to live in a world where nobody can agree on what is real anymore.' 'Eddington' is his first feature to premiere at Cannes. 'I feel like we're on a dangerous road, and we're living in an experiment that hasn't gone well,' Aster said (via Deadline) about his MAGA- and liberal-skewering Western. 'I feel there is no way out of it… Mass liberal democracies always had this fundamental agreement we agree what we're arguing about, that system was coming from power. So it's not like suddenly there's this bad power out there. It's always been there, but right now it's chaos.' Stone, who connected with Aster amid his 2024 'Beau Is Afraid,' said that her research into the conspiracy theories that turn her character against her husband even ended up modifying her personal social media algorithms (via Variety). 'The only additional thing that scared me a little bit in the algorithm system was looking into some of the things that are in this film that haven't been in my algorithm, unfortunately, added them to my algorithm,' she said. 'Because once you start Googling it, you start seeing more and more things. So it's a real rabbit hole, very quickly. Unfortunately, I'm still getting fed some crazy shit.' 'Eddington' is still the most conversation-starting Competition premiere at Cannes, with critics split over its social message and pacing (it's currently at 63 on Metacritic, where you can find reviews all over the map). How A24 will market this movie — only one teaser has been released so far, showing Phoenix doom-scrolling through familiar images of the deepest COVID era — is an intriguing question in the lead-up to its July theatrical release. Alex Garland's 'Civil War,' another post-COVID story of national conflict, did well for A24 last year, grossing more than $127 million by tapping into a fascination factor over a divided United States. Who will 'Eddington' appeal to? Either way, it's pitting Cannes audiences against each other — Screen Daily called it a 'wan satire,' while Variety deemed it 'brazenly provocative' — and will no doubt continue to stoke debate into the summer. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie The 55 Best LGBTQ Movies and TV Shows Streaming on Netflix Right Now
Boston Globe
32 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Sacha Jenkins, filmmaker who mined the Black experience, dies at 53
He was 'an embodiment of 'for us, by us,'' journalist Stereo Williams wrote in a recent appreciation on Okayplayer, a music and culture site. 'He was one of hip-hop's greatest journalistic voices because he didn't just write about the art: He lived it.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up And he lived it from early on. Mr. Jenkins, raised primarily in the Astoria section of Queens, was a graffiti artist as a youth, and sought to bring an insider's perspective to the culture surrounding it with his zine Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language, which he started at 16. He later co-founded Beat-Down newspaper, which covered hip-hop; and the feisty and irreverent magazine Ego Trip, which billed itself as 'the arrogant voice of musical truth.' Advertisement Mr. Jenkins later served a stint as the music editor of Vibe magazine and wrote for publications such as Spin and Rolling Stone, before turning his attention to the screen. Advertisement 'There's a huge void, right?' he said in a 2022 interview with Okayplayer. 'There weren't a lot of documentaries about hip-hop for the longest time. I think hip-hop generated some of the strongest, most powerful storytellers of our generation with the music so it's only natural that we would create projects in the film and television realm that would have resonance.' He joined Mass Appeal, a New York-based media and content company, as the chief creative officer in 2012. Three years later, he directed 'Fresh Dressed,' a documentary that chronicled the rise of urban and hip-hop fashion, tracing elements of Black style from the antebellum plantations of the South to the world's fashion tents. Other notable documentaries included 'Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men' (2019), an Emmy-nominated four-part series that depicted the members of the groundbreaking hip-hop group from Staten Island as 'human-scaled -- determined, gifted, anxious, fallible,' music critic Jon Caramanica wrote in a review in The New York Times. 'Bitchin': The Sound and Fury of Rick James' (2021) explored the radiant and sordid career of the punk funk master, who minted anthems of debauchery including the 1980s hits 'Super Freak' and 'Give It to Me Baby,' but who also crossed the line from personal hedonism to criminal abuse. The film premiered at the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Mr. Jenkins dipped further back into history with 'Louis Armstrong's Black & Blues' (2022), which drew heavily from the personal writings of the artist known as Satchmo, from his reel-to-reel audio diaries and from his letters, read by rapper Nas. The film shed light on the inner racial struggles of a jazz giant who generally kept mum on the topic while becoming a global celebrity beloved by white audiences. Advertisement Mr. Jenkins's films 'were homecomings for Black folk who watch these films with the hope that it's us behind the camera,' artist and writer DJ Lynnée Denise, wrote in an essay. She argued that his work stood in contrast to white directors Ken Burns and Martin Scorsese, whose documentaries about Black music 'replicate centuries of symbolic and material imbalance between Black performers and white industry.' Sacha Sebastian Jenkins was born Aug. 22, 1971, in Philadelphia, the younger of two children of Horace B. Jenkins, an Emmy-winning filmmaker, and Monart Renaud, a visual artist from Haiti. His family moved to Silver Spring, Md., a suburb of Washington, and after his parents separated, his father moved to Harlem and the rest of the family settled in Astoria. Mr. Jenkins came of age in New York at a fertile time in hip-hop culture, as it was spreading from such areas as the South Bronx toward the mainstream. 'We grew up writing graffiti, dancing in the street, rapping in staircases,' he said. People were 'plugging turntables into lampposts on the street.' He became enmeshed in the graffiti art scene, but, as he recalled in an interview last year with the multimedia company Idea Generation, he spent 'more time thinking about graffiti and writing about graffiti and publishing magazines about graffiti than doing graffiti.' After launching Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language and Beat-Down newspaper, he joined forces with two friends, Elliott Wilson and Jeff Mao, to form Ego Trip magazine, which covered hip-hop and a variety of topics, including skateboarding and punk rock. 'White kids who like rock love hip-hop by this point,' he said. 'You can't keep putting people in boxes.' Advertisement In the late 1990s, Ego Trip expanded to books, including 'Ego Trip's Big Book of Racism!' which caught the eye of producers at VH1. The cable network enlisted the Ego Trip team to develop satirical shows including 'TV's Illest Minority Moments,' which lampooned the media's depictions of people of color, and 'The (White) Rapper Show,' a reality competition. Mr. Jenkins also published several books, including collaborating with Eminem on the rapper's 2008 book 'The Way I Am.' In addition to his wife, Mr. Jenkins leaves a son, Marceau, a stepdaughter, Djali Brown-Cepeda, and a grandson. Mr. Jenkins's tart views on race in America were on display in 'Everything's Gonna Be All White,' his 2022 Showtime docuseries that sought to tell 'a tale of two Americas, one white, one not,' featuring pointed commentary about racism from a broad swath of people of color. The documentary touched on the notion of a Black Jesus, the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack, and 'white noise,' which Mr. Jenkins argued happens to people of color when they internalize messaging from the white power structure. 'It's a subliminal fuzz, constant, like a ringing in your ear,' he said in an interview that year with the film and television news site The Credits. 'It's always there, right, but you become used to it. If you focus on that frequency, it's going to confuse you, encourage you to make the wrong decisions, like not being conscious of casting folks of color in a film about folks of color.' This article originally appeared in
