All About the Benjamins: Ice Cube Says Hollywood Owes Black Entertainers Reparations

(AP Photo/Kathy Willens, file)
AP featured image
FILE – In this June 25, 2017 file photo Big3 Basketball League founder Ice Cube applauds the crowd during a timeout in the first half of Game 2 in the league’s debut at the Barclays Center in New York. Ice Cube tips off talking about his BIG3 basketball league and also kicks it about his music and movies on PodcastOne Sports Now on Tuesday, July 31, 2018. (AP Photo/Kathy Willens, file)
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Are any of you white readers roarin’ and ready to go on reparations? And what if you’re El Salvadorian? Would you still need to pay?

It’s a bit unclear how things would work, but the usual underlying idea’s that black people have been kept poor by the extended heritage of slavery.

Given that, here’s a question — what about black millionaires who’ve been kept down?

Ice Cube has an answer: Those in Hollywood are owed a pie slice, too.

The rapper-turned-movie man’s calling on Tinseltown to pay up.

During a Wednesday interview with Charlamagne tha God, Cube told The Breakfast Club’s audience that oppressive studios have contributed to the pain of black entertainers, and the piper’s readied his credit-card machine:

“Virtually all the studios who contributed in our narrative, in our pain, in our misrepresentation, in stealing our history and giving it to…white people for over 100 years. So I think these studios that we…love should kick in to a studio that’s [run] by black people with no outside influences, and whose movies and projects are owned by those black people…”

The BIG3 basketball league founder — whose real name is O’Shea Jackson — thinks it’s time for studios to cough up ownership of their stuff as well. How ’bout they’ll only be able to purchase licenses?

“Those black artists, those black directors and writers, and people who put the projects together should own the projects. And these studios, they can license the projects, the movies, or the TV shows or whatever, or they don’t have to.”

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And it sounds as if he’s game for a black-only-owned app:

“We can put [the films and shows] on our own streaming services. I just think it’s a form of reparations from the entertainment industry if they all had to invest a certain amount of money into the studio each year as payment for all the damage they’ve done to black people.”

More broadly, the Ride Along star wants to see mathematical precision:

“[We’re] catching hell no matter [who’s] in office, and we always have. So we need to think about who’s gonna support this plan, and try to better the whole country…try to do it in [an] across-the-board, broad manner. Because…stomping out little fires here and there, it just ain’t gonna cut it. We are 13% of this country — more, 13.5 — and we deserve 13.5%…straight up. Across the board. …We’re not trying to get to reform. We need equality, straight up. … Why reform a system that was geared towards our demise? We need to be equal.”

It seems to me that promotes a principle which would deflate all of Hollywood like the biggest pin prick puncturing the littlest balloon: If 13.5% of the population deserves 13.5% of the wealth, then — in a country of roughly 330,000,000 — 1/330,000,000th of America deserves the same fraction of its cash.

Start perfectly dividing equity from coast to coast, and the silver screen’s megastars’ll be moving into lofts lickety-split.

Speaking of millionaires, Charlemagne asked Cube — who’s reportedly worth $160 million — whether he considers himself free in the USA.

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As it turns out, it’s impossible:

“No. [There’s] no way to feel free in America. because I’m connected to our people, you know, so I actually feel the pain.”

He’s connected:

“You feel it in your bones. That’s how I feel when I see something [happens] to one of us in the street. I feel it in my bones, and so I don’t feel free. I feel like that person. I feel like that can happen to me. That can happen to one of my sons. That can happen to my daughter. That can happen to my nephews, nieces, my father. That can happen to my mother.”

To Ice Cube, freedom’s about more than cold, hard cash:

“How the hell are you going to feel free in this country just ‘cause you got money? That ain’t sh–.”

Whether Benjamins buy freedom, the notion of Hollywood forking over reparations probably suits a lot of middle Americans just fine — after all, it’d likely come from the pockets of those who’ve championed similarly left-wing ideas in the public square — it’s a veritable WokeFest out there. Why not put their money where their mouths are?

Beverly Hills is full of liberals. Now’s their chance to lead by example.

Time to give it up, one-percenters.

Back to the studios, as for a cold Caucasian creative clamp-down on movies’ melanated makers, Mr. Jackson offered, “Every artist I know — every great actor or director or writer — has ten projects they can’t get made because some white people can’t understand what they’re trying to make. … There needs to be a place where Hollywood pays for what they’ve done to our people.”

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Right-O. Let’s go, La La Land. Stick it to ’em, Cube.

-ALEX

 

See more pieces from me:

Dog Day Afternoon: A Man is Arrested for Teaching His Pit Bull How to Drive

Grabbing the Virus by the Horns: A Woman Defies Quarantine to Ride NYC’s Charging Bull – Topless

Move Over, Thor: Marvel Launches Superwoke Heroes ‘Snowflake’ and ‘Safespace’

Find all my RedState work here.

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