Talib Kweli has remained vocal about educating the masses on racial injustice and the growth of gun culture in the U.S. Recently, he sat down for a conversation featured on Spotify’s “Clarify” program, where he discussed the aforementioned topics.
The native New Yorker spoke on his signing of a Billboard letter to Congress, which was sparked after the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Fla., calling on government officials to pass more stringent background checks to prevent the easiness of obtaining a firearm.
That letter was easy for me to sign my name to because Chris Rock did a Saturday Night Live monologue a couple of years ago which ended up being very prophetic because he talks about we’re going to see 9/11 sales, he talks about the commercialization of Christmas, he talks about how he spoke out against gun violence and he got all of these threats. He said, ‘Oh, I need a gun,’ but he mentions that he’s not super-pro anti-gun, I’m not anti-gun at all, I just think that you shouldn’t have a machine gun in your house across the street from a school the same way I can’t drive a Nascar down the street. I think that was a very clear way to state it.
Following that statement, Kweli shared that the foundation of America was built “on the gun.”
“I’m anti-violent and I’m anti-gun,” he said. “I don’t own a gun. I don’t live a life that requires me to have a gun. I can’t say that that’s for everybody. I can’t speak on everybody’s situation. While I am a proponent of not having guns, I think that there’s a bottom line or a reality that we all can agree on about the safety precautions. American culture is built on the gun.”
Later, the “Get By” rapper touched upon the “concept of the gun” and America’s bloody past.
“The way America is set up is to capitalize on the blood and the sweat and the labor and the genocide of people and then ignore that. The whole concept of the gun is that – the lack of accountability or the lack of responsibility. You can be from a distance and destroy someone from a distance. You don’t have to deal with that upfront.”
View the interview below where Kweli speaks on the history of the NRA, the SWAT, the current election, and more.