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Rapper The Game is jumping into the reheated debate over whether Black Americans should receive reparations for having endured slavery and more, saying that the compensation should include something like a luxury car — plus 40 acres of land.
Playing on the phrase “40 acres and a mule,” The Game, 39, told TMZ that reparations should include “40 acres and a Lambo,” a reference to the Lamborghini line of luxury sports cars.
READ MORE: ‘Why not now?’ Ta-Nehisi Coates and Danny Glover join lawmakers to debate slavery reparations
The celeb news website caught up with The Game, whose given name is Jayceon Terrell Taylor, at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, where he was hosting a listening party.
The Game added more, taking a somewhat negative view of what might come from reparations.
“I don’t know what it’s going to do,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what it does because the country was built on the backs of, you know, slavery.”
The concept of reparations, compensation to Black Americans for all the health-related, economic and social impacts they’ve experienced in the years since slavery, has long been debated or ignored by lawmakers, but in recent days received a boost when Congress for the first time held a hearing into the issue.
A proposed bill that was the subject of the hearing calls for a commission that would develop ways to compensate for the effects of slavery and coordinate a national apology.
U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., supports the bill as do 60 more House Democrats, The New York Times reports.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the frontrunner in the Democratic race to challenge President Trump, and about 10 other Democratic presidential candidates also support the concept.
“We have not had a conversation about reparations on this scale or level since the Reconstruction era,” William Darity, a professor at Duke University writing a book about reparations, told the Times. “To be blunt, I am more optimistic than I ever have been in my life about the prospect of the enactment of a reparations program that is comprehensive and transformative.”
READ MORE: Lawmakers debate reparations for slavery: ‘We elected an African-American president’
Asked who he’ll be voting for in the 2020 presidential elections, he also remarked that he did not believe he could vote because he has a conviction on his record (he was sentenced to 60-days in jail in 2008 for felony firearm possession).
“I’m a felon, bro,” he remarked. “So let’s make sure felons can vote. Count every vote. Just because you made a mistake, you can’t vote, you’re not a citizen? I can still go to jail in America, right?”
Actually, in California, where The Game is based, ex-offenders have their rights restored after an inmate’s time is done and parole is completed, so the MC should have not problem casting a vote next year.
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