Atlanta-baed rapper, actor and entrepreneur Killer Mike (born Michael Render) surprised Power 105.1 yesterday with his visit to the Breakfast Club. Mike was scheduled to leave New York that day, but DJ Envy spotted him at the club last night and insisted that he come to the show before leaving the city. Killer Mike is no stranger to the Breakfast Club, so it was only moments before the questions began. However, Mike was not on the air to talk about any upcoming projects or anything of the sort; he was there to discuss recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.
Mike prefaced the entire interview — which later became a deeper discussion on police brutality, political apathy, and national responsibility — with what he found most troubling with the national response to the senseless killing of Michael Brown. After declaring that we are all human beings, regardless of nationality or race, Killer Mike explained that if we have reached a national level where we "lack the sympathy and empathy to sympathize with a child that laid dying on the ground face down in the summer heat for four hours, if we lack empathy and all we have is apathy, then we've lost a bit of our humanity."
Mike continued the interview remembering that his father was a police officer when he was younger, which provided him with a foundation in understanding law and justice in this country that allowed him to expand the discussion on police brutality, inviting a conversation on exercising constitutional rights.
Really what I'm disgraced by is that America has gotten to the point where we're so comfortable choosing sides. Well I'm black middle class, well I'm white middle class, I'm working class, I'm poor. We've gotten conditioned to picking these boxes, to the point that we don't see the brutal and real truth before us. I don't care if you argue that kid was a thug, I don't care if you argue black on black crime, I don't care any of the senseless arguments you have that you argue. An American's constitutional rights to due process were eliminated with those six bullets. I am an American, I am promised a certain amount of rights by the Bill of Rights in the United States' Constitution, and anytime a policeman puts me in a chokehold and ignores me saying "I can't breathe" and I die in front of cameras, in front of other Americans on a New York street, or a child dies in the streets of a suburb in St. Louis, all of our rights are affected. It makes all of our rights easier to trample on.
Killer Mike, as he points out here, has had the privilege of traveling the world and speaking with all types of people, and he shared with the Breakfast Club that the people outside of this nation find the rights of this country amazing, rights that we take for granted. Now that we've been forced to deal with such tragedies like the loss of Mike Brown, Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin, we wonder why the officials appointed to protect us are now the main culprits in our communities' demise; however, we fail to realize that we have the power to appoint officials working in our interest.
Mike also urges that we vote in our local elections, that we pay attention to who is running our local governments, and that we get involved with grassroots organizations, because we cannot change corrupt politics at the national level without addressing them on a local level. He closed the interview advising that we "need to stop talking about what we gon' do, need to stop marching and stop singing, and we need to go somewhere and plot, plan, strategize, organize, and mobilize."
I can only hope that Killer Mike's wise words are not taken for granted, and us members of the community really digest his wisdom. We are powerful but if we do not exercise that power, we can expect tragedies like the one unfolding in Missouri to continue. What would it take for you to get involved?
