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Soulja Boy gives 'shout out' to slave masters


MARLO STANSFIELD

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He may well inspire a dance that's worth 40m YouTube hits, but that doesn't mean Soulja Boy Tell 'Em is an expert in race relations. At BET's Hip-Hop Awards wrap event last week, the 18-year-old Atlanta rapper shocked the crowd by coming out in favour of slavery.

The shock statement came when BET correspondent and former Rolling Stone contributor, Touré, asked various stars which historical figure they most hated. After Soulja Boy failed to give a response, Touré tried to prompt him, saying "Others have said Hitler, bin Laden, the slave masters ... " at which point Soulja Boy said: "Oh wait! Hold up! Shout out to the slave masters! Without them we'd still be in Africa. We wouldn't be here to get this ice and tattoos."

The stars were answering questions based on the Proust Questionnaire, a series of questions popularised by French writer Marcel Proust. An adapted version appears regularly in Vanity Fair magazine.

"I thought [the Proust Questionnaire] would be a way to get beyond image and into who they really are," wrote Touré on his Daily Beast blog. "Most of the guys gave good, thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive answers."

The rapper's fans have claimed Soulja Boy's youth as an excuse, although many bloggers have been more critical. As 4 Cryin Out Loud asks, "How old was Ice Cube when he first emerged and was writing rhymes for Eazy - like 16?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/nov/04/soulja-boy-slavery

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How is it better?

about everyone knows that

Are you pretending to misundertand me?

If you offered me a choice between the living standards and acccess to healthcare, education, public services of the average African-American versus the average African it wouldn't be a hard choice

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Africa would be a whole different place if it wasnt for slavery and colonialism

Probably. Would be a worse place most likely.

NEGD

Cool resonse brah. Do you even know what you're talking about, or is that just your knee-jerk reaction to "racists" who don't think Africa was a paradise pre-colonialism.

Colonialism has undeniably had some significant negative effects on the way subsaharan states have developed over the last few decades, but trying to pin the blame for everything on the west is just a cop-out. Take Zambia for example: it's been a republic for 50 years or so and remains extremely poor and without resources such as railways, despite being extremely rich in things like copper deposits. So how is it that their main railroad was built by the Chinese, and that the wealth of resources available are being extracted not by the Zambian government, but by the Chinese?

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