T.I. doesn’t believe in cancel culture.
“All this cancel culture, I think it’s fake,” he said on The Tamron Hall Show on Tuesday. “Like JAY-Z said, ‘first they hate you, then they love you, then they hate you again,” Tip said, referencing lyrics from Hov’s “Meet the Parents.”
Even though people are quick to cancel others, Tip thinks they don’t stick to their beliefs. “You’ll keep wearing Gucci but you’ll cancel Kanye,” he said, referencing Gucci's blackface sweater controversy from earlier this year. Tip noted that though he doesn’t agree with Ye’s political views, he still sees him as an artistic genius, adding that cancel culture has become “convenient.”
Hall pointed out that a lot of those “canceling” Ye were his black fans, to which Tip said, “It’s easier to tear a black man down because another black man will help you.”
On Wednesday, Barack Obama touched on cancel culture during a panel at the third annual Obama Foundation Summit in Chicago. Speaking with Yara Shahidi, Obama explained the difference between online activism and making an actual impact.
“I do get this sense sometimes among young people… [that] the way for me to make change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that's enough,” Obama said. “That's not activism.”
Watch a clip from T.I.'s interview above.
