(AllHipHop News) In the current political climate, conversations about race issues are hard to avoid. Hip Hop is no exception. Many followers of the culture expect white rappers to at least acknowledge the concerns of African-Americans.
Jaime “El-P” Meline was a recent guest on Talib Kweli’s People’s Party podcast. Part of the Uproxx conversation included the Run The Jewels representative discussing the relationship between his race and his profession.
“I always found it a little distasteful to talk about or to put myself in any type of light that might insinuate that there was this struggle that I had because I was white [and] I was trying to get into rap,” said El-P.
The Brooklyn-bred producer/rapper went on to talk about how it was never his inclination to “play up” the fact that he is Caucasian. El-P explained he typically chooses not to engage questions about what it is like to be a white man in a majority-black industry, but the Company Flow founding member did express his appreciation for how Hip Hop has impacted his way of thinking.
“If I hadn’t had rap music, I don’t know, as a middle-class white kid, how long it would have taken me to be exposed to the truth. It helped in the lifting of the veil,” said El-P. “I don’t know how long it would have taken me, if I didn’t have rap music, to realize there was a whole hella a lot of bullsh*t.”
El-P teamed with Atlanta emcee Killer Mike to release the critically-acclaimed Run The Jewels album in 2013. The duo went on to drop two more studio LPs with a fourth installment in the Run The Jewels series expected to come out in 2020.
