Clearly, Jay-Z has been blessed beyond his wildest dreams.
Not only is he a world-renowned rapper (and the husband of THEE Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter), but he’s also a successful producer and entrepreneur, with a reported net worth of $1.3 billion.
Coming from where he comes from, that’s a lot to be proud of — but not everyone is impressed by his success.
In fact, Jay has often been accused of being a capitalist, whose sole focus, a lot of the times, seems to be only on growing his own fortune — no matter the situation.
Well, he finally addressed that criticism this week on Twitter Spaces — and basically wrote it off as a way for people to stifle Black entrepreneurs.
“We not gone stop,” he began. “Hip-hop is young. It’s still growing. We not falling for that trick-nology the public puts out there now.”
“Before it was the American Dream: ‘Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You can make it in America,'” he continued. “All these lies that America told us our whole life and then when we start getting it, they try to lock us out of it. They start inventing words like ‘capitalist.’”
Jay suggested that, to him, that’s almost like calling someone a racial slur. “We’ve been called ‘n******’ and ‘monkeys’ and shit,” he went on. “I don’t care what words y’all come up with. Y’all gotta come with stronger words. We’re not gonna stop.”
Explaining his “evolution” from a young man selling CDs in New York to now one of the most richest people in America, he stated that no one should be made to “feel ashamed to be successful in a place that set up a system for [Black people] to be dead at 21” and shared his hope that he’ll keep finding new financial opportunities.
It honestly just prompted more eyerolls, especially the part where he compared being called a capitalist to getting called a racial slur.
Jay-Z hasn’t responded to the subsequent backlash, but something tells me we might be hearing more about this later on a verse. We’ll see.