The Internet neighborhood known as “Black Twitter” had something of a block party on March 11 at the expense of the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” after the pundits gave their take on the racist song chanting of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Oklahoma.
Show hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough cited rapper Waka Flocka Flame’s reaction to the racist video and decision to cancel a pending appearance then suggested that the fraternity’s language and behavior may be tied to the language used in some hip-hop music.
“If you look at every single song, I guess you call these, that he’s written, it’s a bunch of garbage,” said Brzezinski. “It’s full of N-words, it’s full of F-words. It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself.”
“The kids that are buying hip-hop or gangster rap, it’s a White audience, and they hear this over and over again,” chimed in Scarborough. “So 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.”
After some of the initial backlash, Brzezsinski attempted to backtrack during an appearance on the network later in the day.
“The students in the video are responsible for their behavior. And as we said on our show this morning, they did it, and it’s beyond appalling,” Brzezsinski said. “In no way is anybody else to blame for what they did on that bus. They are responsible and they made that choice.”
Unfortunately for Brzezsinski and Scarborough (but fortunately for us), by the time her semi-recantation happened, Black Twitter had already begun to unload through the hilarious hashtag #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery, which was a sarcastic highlighting of the fact that the language used in the frat video existed long before hip-hop music was conceived.
Check out some of the hilarious tweets after the cut.
