Bone Thugs-n-Harmony legend Layzie Bone ruffled a few feathers after he shared a meme on Thursday (July 16) that read: “If Black Lives Really Mattered, They’d Stop Shooting Each Other.”
Unsurprisingly, the Hip Hop OG faced a healthy amount of backlash with many commenters pointing out the hypocrisy of a rapper who contributed to songs such as “Mo’ Murder” and “Bout That Murder” featuring Outlawz.
Royce Da 5’9, who commented “Just like that huh?” under Layzie’s post, decided to use the meme as a teachable moment.
View this post on Instagram??♂️ Welp
In an Instagram Live session, the Slaughterhouse MC admitted he was “triggered” by some of the comments and felt he needed to respond.
“If I say Black Lives Matter and you counter it with anything, you’re automatically coming to the table with a problem as opposed to a solution,” he said. “Black Lives Matter is meant to fight the injustices that we’re faced with and other injustices are due to systems that are set in place that gives the police pretty much carte blanche to do a lot of the tyrannical things that they’ve been doing.
“And a lot of these systems allow white people from hate groups to integrate into these different groups and systems and now, they’re in positions of power and they’re in different places to where they can affect us directly.”
Here’s How Royce Da 5’9 Was Able To Shed All Homophobia From His Life
He continued, “All of us are PTSD. A lot of our transgressions are rooted in slavery. It’s an every man for himself mentality we’ve kind of been born into, we’ve been indoctrinated and we gotta unpack that ourselves. I’m more prone to be violent toward my own brother than I am just toward white people just for being white or Jewish people for whatever.”
Royce then insisted the current climate in the United States is the “perfect time to be brutally honest and speak your “unapologetic truth.” But the veteran Motor City rapper wasn’t anywhere close to finished there.
In another video, Nickel Nine went on to say it doesn’t matter if a real estate agent takes “master” out of “master suite” when selling a home or Aunt Jemima is no longer the face on a pancake mix if people aren’t having the tough conversations. He also opened up about his older brother’s struggles and explained how he became a “product of the system.”
In yet a third video, Royce expounded on how being Black in America affects him every single day, saying, “My life is in imminent danger as soon as I walk outside and I can’t stay inside because if I stay inside, I’m the hunted instead of hunting. If you can’t relate to living your life that way or you’ve never been in the situations of living your life that way or you don’t truly identify with these situations that you’re talking at, these environments that you’re talking at that you don’t understand, just don’t speak on it. Don’t even bother putting the other shoe on the other foot ’cause it’s not that simple.
“I don’t think most people are waking up and saying, ‘Man I can’t wait to kill me some niggas today — ’cause I’m Black — I can’t wait to go kill a nigga.’ I see little kids in environments who aren’t killers. You see some of them walking up on people and getting it done and then you see most of ’em, they can’t do it, so they shootin’ stray bullets and that’s how little kids get killed, that’s how innocent people get killed … that’s coon behavior and that’s brought on by the oppressors.”
Layzie hasn’t directly responded to Royce — but one of his last Instagram posts suggests he’s trying to stay out of it. On Friday (July 17), he posted a meme that read, “People with purpose & goals have no time for drama. They invest their energy in things that will add value to their life and others.
He wrote in the caption, “Read ’em don’t weep.”
Check back with HipHopDX next week for an exclusive interview with Layzie Bone. Until then, watch Royce’s commentary in full above.
View this post on InstagramRead’em don’t weep ✊?