Last year, rapper Bun B attended the Republican National Convention and documented his experience for Vice. During the event, the rapper-turned-professor got into a verbal altercation with a Donald Trump supporter after the supporter gave him the middle finger. Now, a year later, the video is making the rounds again.
Most people sharing the video have assumed it’s more recent than last year, especially after the incidents in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend, but make no mistake: Bun B still has a few words for all the white supremacists and other white people out there.
“I think it’s important for people to know this is an old video,” Bun B told Fader. “This isn’t six months after the election; this is six months before. This is how emboldened these people were at the time that Trump was on the road verbalizing this divisive rhetoric. They were already emboldened by what Trump was saying on the campaign trail before he even had the Republican nomination. It was just as explicit then, but now there’s more of them. They’ve built their numbers up significantly.”
The rapper also had a few words of advice for white people who don’t want to be associated with white supremacists, and it’s pretty simple: Call them out on their shit.
“It’s easier to point them out when they’re marching with torches, and doing Nazi chants and Nazi salutes and carrying Confederate flags and whatnot. But there are a lot of other people who don’t visibly express their racism in public on a daily basis,” Bun B said. “They know who their racist neighbor is, they know who their racist co-worker is, they know who their racist family members are. White America has to make a decision about what side of history they’re going to stand on.”
The rapper says that in one respect, those who are against racism should be more like the white supremacists who were seen in Charlottesville, with their guns strapped and ready to pop off: They have to prove they’re willing to die for what’s right.
“They’re willing to die for their hate; we have to be willing to die for our love and for the future of this world,” he stated.