Member-only story
Trump, Ice Cube, and the Racist Roots of Black Capitalism
Black capitalism, touted by the Trump Administration as the way forward, was promoted by Republicans as a counter to the Black Power movement. It cannot help us now.
“Leaders gonna lead, haters gonna hate,” Black MAGA ambassador and onetime Trump spokesperson Katrina Pierson tweeted this week — to Ice Cube.
Black Twitter immediately jumped on the irony of the original N.W.A being down with the GOP. Ice Cube quickly defended his actions, claiming that while both parties had reached out to him regarding his Contract With Black America (CWBA), Republicans were willing to move quickly on his recommendations.
Perhaps Cube should have considered more closely what an association with the GOP would demand of his reputation. In this late stage of capitalism, Republican money is blood money.
He isn’t the only Black man down for that particular cause. “Today is historic because for the first time you have a Republican president and a Republican agenda that’s focused on the economic empowerment of the Black community,” Ja’Ron Smith, an advisor to President Donald Trump, said in an NPR interview regarding the administration’s economic development plan for Black people. Dubbed the “Platinum Plan” by the Trump administration, the program includes “a $500 billion investment in Black communities across the country, increasing access to capital to fuel Black-owned Businesses, a tax cut, increased education opportunities, lowering the cost of health care, making Juneteenth a national holiday, prosecuting the KKK and ANTIFA as terrorist organizations, and making lynching a national hate crime.”
To reap these financial boons, Ice Cube and those who support Trump’s version of the CWBA must disavow some of the people on the streets protesting for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake. It seems like Cube’s new association has forced him to sacrifice the Black rebellious…
