Asian Doll & Pop Smoke’s Brother Discuss Dealing With Grief On ‘Peace Of Mind With Taraji’

Obasi Jackson advocates for Black men to be more vulnerable.

2020 saw the loss of two rappers who were on the cusp of stardom. In February, Bashar “Pop Smoke” Jackson was killed during a home invasion in California. Nine months later, Dayvon “King Von” Bennett was killed outside an Atlanta nightspot.

Of course, fans of the two late entertainers were hit hard by the news of their respective deaths, but their loved ones were surely struck with grief by their untimely passing. Award-winning actress Taraji P. Henson spoke to Pop’s brother and Von’s former girlfriend for Facebook Watch’s newest talk show Peace of Mind with Taraji.

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“My whole world just crashed. I had never felt a feeling like that. It’s like I was just broken. I want to say like six days before he passed we had broken up and I was real hard on him, I was not tryna see him, I did not want to see him at all,” Asian Doll told Henson and Boris Lawrence Henson Foundation Executive Director Tracie Jade about the loss of King Von.

The Doll SZN Reloaded mixtape creator added, “You can chase this life as long as you want but this cycle it just keeps getting repeated and repeated and repeated to the point it’s like how many more rappers or music influencers are we going to lose until people just really wake up?”

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Pop Smoke’s brother, Obasi Jackson, also appeared on the program to talk about the sudden death of his sibling. He addressed dealing with mental health issues as a result of losing a family member and having to navigate through that heavy emotional pain.

Obasi said, “I’m a firm believer that men, Black men too, should be vulnerable… and allow themselves to open up and show the world what they’re feeling and who they truly are. Because we’ve been suppressed, we’ve been locked up, and that’s where all these barbaric actions kind of come from. My mind can’t even grasp onto it sometimes.”