Many people forget that former Roc-A-Fella CEO Dame Dash and increasingly bizarre actress turned Fox News correspondent Stacey Dash are first cousins.
Since her recent outlandish comments that people of color have no right to be upset at being excluded from Oscar nominations because whites are excluded from BET and other black focused entities, many in the Hip-Hop community have decried her stance including the legendary Bun B of UGK, who called her “the biggest coon in the room” in a lengthy Instagram post on the issue.
In a recent interview with Dr. Boyce Watkins, Dame was asked what he thought of the reaction to his cousin’s comments and relayed that he’s far from happy.
“It really isn’t the best thing to hear ‘Dash’ associated with cooning,” he said, “but it is what it is. That’s my life.”
As for his thoughts on why or how his cousin could make such seemingly self-hateful statements, Dash says he thinks she was paid to do so but her comments may have come off a little more harsh than she intended.
“I think she was saying, you can’t be, ‘Yo BET we have our own Black stuff that we don’t invite White people to and then get mad when White people don’t invite us to their stuff.’,” Dash told Watkins. “That’s how I looked at it. But then I was just like, ‘She didn’t have to say it like that or (on) there or get paid to say it.’ I would have way preferred her, if she has that opinion, to say it on BET or have a conversation with someone Black when she was saying that and let someone Black have a conversation back with her as opposed to some White man nodding his head.”
Watkins also asked Dash what he thought of the call to boycott the Oscars by Jada Pinkett-Smith. The 44-year-old music mogul says he’s a bit weary of Smith’s motives and questions if she’d feel as strongly if her husband, Will Smith, wasn’t snubbed for a Best Actor nod, as many believe he was.
“Let’s say Will Smith didn’t have an Oscar or a movie out, would he still boycott?” Dash asked. “I don’t have a movie in there. I’ve had movies that I felt should have been nominated, like The Woodsman and Shadowboxer. I felt snubbed. Right now, it’s kind of hard to hear somebody say, ‘Yo, I’m not going to the Oscars ’cause I wasn’t invited’ and expect everyone else not to. What about everyone that’s not invited all the time? So I would rather hear Will say that when he didn’t have a movie out or Jada. It would seem a little more objective as opposed to personal.”
