After being in the rap game for nearly 30 years, Fat Joe is finally addressing the question that Black hip-hop fans have been wondering for years: can he use the N-word?
The short answer is no because he’s not Black, he’s Latino. Simple.
During his appearance on the Breakfast Club on Tuesday, Joey Crack defended his use of the word saying, “First of all my projects is 90%, I’ll give you 80% Black still. My grandmother’s projects is 99.9% Black to be clear. So I’m Spanish, I knew I was Latino, but the whole time I thought I was Black anyway. So my mom lives there 40 years before I was born, in this project, and I’m born blonde hair green eyes. This shit crazy, right? She brings me there, the first thing is they go, ‘Oh look at this little nigga Joey he got green eyes.’ The minute I’m walking the guys in the building is like, ‘Yo look at that little nigga Joe, little Fat Joe,’ that’s all I knew my whole life before even elementary.”
He continued, “It’s a lot of woke society or something going on these days and Twitter and all that I guess they don’t understand where I come from, where I was born, or how I was raised or how I lived my whole entire life...We know that the record states that this is a negative word and I wish we never used it. You know? and I try my best...really seriously I been trying to stop, but I been saying this since I was born.”
Nah, I think we understand where you come from, you just explained it to us. But using the N-word? It is something you cannot do, despite your background or your relationship with Black people.
Your friends from the Bronx failed to call you out, so the “woke police” are doing what your friends couldn’t, holding you accountable.
Fat Joe acknowledged that he used the word because he thought he was Black. But once you learned about your heritage and that you were in fact not Black, a bell in your head should’ve gone off saying, “I can’t say the N-word anymore.”
I truly don’t understand how people who claim that because they’ve used the word their whole life and they’ve grown up around Black people who called them the N-word can equate this to mean that they’re allowed to use it years later. You’re not. Just because people allowed it then doesn’t mean people are going to be cool with you saying it now.