US TV host finally finds real source of fraternity racism: rappers

A US breakfast-television-host-cum-Sherlock-Holmes appears to have finally worked out the real racists in a week when a bunch of white fraternity students repeatedly chanted the n-word and sang a song about lynching. Yes, you guessed it, black rappers.

On the Morning Joe show on MSNBC, co-host Mika Brzezinski went on a tirade against rapper Waka Flocka Flame because he responded to the racist chanting of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon students by saying he was "shocked, stunned and deeply saddened".

There's this rapper - Waka Flocka Flame - who has performed for these kids in the past on the campus...

And I'm like look at his lyrics and... if you look at every single song, I guess you call it, it's a bunch of garbage, full of n-words, full of f-bombs, it's wrong. He shouldn't be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself. That's all I have to say.

• Mika Brzezinski

Her co-host Joe Scarborough, sitting amongst the all-white panel, then piped in with some wondrous insight of his own.

And by the way, as anybody that watches Empire [a TV show about hip hop] knows, 70 per cent of the audience is white.

The kids that are buying this hip hop, or gangsta rap... It’s a white audience, and they hear this over and over again. Do they hear this at home? Well chances are good, no, they heard a lot of this from guys like this who are now acting shocked.

• Joe Scarborough

Because clearly a song containing the lyric "you can hang 'em from a tree, but they'll never sign with me" has nothing to do with centuries of institutionalised racism, a history of slavery or a culture of white supremacy and definitely (definitely) has everything to with what the Atlantic describes as a "goofball Atlanta MC".

Thankfully, regaining some semblance of balance, pundit Willie Geist finally added: "I'd love to never hear that word again... but there is a distinction between a bunch of white kids chanting about hanging someone from a tree, using that word in a hateful way and this is a term that you hear in hip hop, that African American guys sometimes use in certain contexts."

You can watch the whole exchange here:

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