After rumors that he was siding with Donald Trump, Ice Cube cleared it all up nicely on Cuomo Prime Time in mid-October 2020. Simultaneously, he also was able to bring more national awareness to his government-proposed Contract With Black America.
“Chris, your lead-ins are a little misleading,” said O’shea Jackson (the legendary rapper’s given name) to American Journalist Chris Cuomo on the widely watched CNN program.
“How so?” Chris asked.
“Well, the Platinum Plan is not my plan,” Cube began. “I came up with the Contract with Black America. And, I didn’t run to work with any campaign. Both campaigns contacted me. Both campaigns wanted to talk to me about the Contract With Black America. One campaign said ‘We love what you have, but let’s really dig into it after the election. One campaign said ‘We love what you have, do you mind talking to us about it. And that’s what I did. So, I didn’t run to nobody, so that was real misleading to me.”
What Is Ice Cube’s Contract With Black America?
Ice Cube put the Contract With Black America in front of many politicians and, according to one Yahoo Money article from late August 2020, he demanded that politicians sign it before they get the support of Black American voters.
Even more recently, he had what Urban Radio Nation describes as a “somber and serious” conversation with the ladies on Red Table Talk. Jada Pinkett Smith asked him about wanting to do this contract when George Floyd was murdered by police. “I seen that with George Floyd, and it kinda shook me to my core,” he said. “You know, seeing a man face down on the ground like that, and this White officer looking into the camera, just taking a Black man’s life. Having a man scream for his Mama, you know. It just reminded me of stories I heard of when a slave would get outta line, and they would pull everybody around to show the discipline, and made everybody watch, and live that horror. So, I cancelled everything. I was supposed to go on Good Morning America that day. I couldn’t take it no more. I was just so mad, and so hurt. But then I was like ‘Something needs to be done’.”
Cube also voiced on Instagram how he felt that Black people in America should be asking themselves what they should be getting within the first 100 days after the Presidential election, and why if a politician wants their Black vote, then they need to sign the Contract With Black America, which promotes racial economic justice.
“What’s in it for us?” Cube asks in response to what he saw after watching a political convention. “What’s in it for the Black community besides the same old thing we’ve been getting…We gotta start something right now. Democrats don’t seem like they got a plan. Republicans don’t seem like they got a plan for us. So how the hell you gonna vote for them? Make then EARN that vote. They can start today. They ain’t got it yet. Stop playing with these people and they’ll stop playing with you.”
Diplomat, Activist and Former Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Jackson Young, is a full supporter of the Ice Cube’s Contract With Black America, one that “demands an open debate and clear and fair vote within the first 100 days of the 117th Congress in 2021” on the proposals that the contract sets forth to be specifically arranged.
Trump’s team (who is in desperate need of the Black vote) took Ice Cube’s proposal as an opportunity, while Biden’s team said they’d talk with him after the election. Trump’s team decided to make adjustments to their Platinum Plan with some of the provisions of the Contract With Black America blended in. For example, according to New York Magazine, the plan now promises to increase Black Americans’ access to capital by $500 billion, to have the Klux Klux Klan (referred to by the Southern Poverty Law Center an America’s first real terrorist organization) actually be prosecuted as a terrorist organization, and to make Juneteenth (which recognizes June 19th, 1865 as the day slavery ended in the United States) a National Holiday.
Congress would of course have to approve making Juneteeth a holiday, and Trump’s team has not said in detail exactly how they are going to go about giving Black Americans access to that $500 billion dollars amidst so many business owners in lower-income communities who are suffering through the effects that the Coronavirus pandemic has had on the U.S. economy. But, one thing is for sure…Ice Cube has the government’s ear, and both Democrats and Republicans are attentively listening.
Ice Cube Is Definitely Not Siding With Donald Trump
All in all, Ice Cube has made it clear to America and to the world that he is not siding with Donald Trump. He’s not siding with Joe Biden, either. Ice Cube is not on a team with Republicans or Democrats. As a U.S. citizen, the man is thinking independently, and is looking for action from whoever happens to be in governmental power and who is truly willing to put the provisions of his Contract With Black America in full effect.
That being said, he has his Freedom of Speech (as we all do), and always uses it well as an MC to voice his opinions through music. In his November 2018 banger Arrest The President, you could hear that political side of Ice Cube come out. Those hard lyrics in the first verse where he unloaded on Donald Trump were instantly ear-catching and memorable. “Arrest the President, you got the evidence / That n***a is Russian Intelligence…” Cube spits. Coincidentally, the same year that the California native dropped this track was the same year that The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for their series of articles on Trump and the Russians.
Also, it was so funny the next couple of lines in the song when Cube joked about Trump’s skin color. “When it rains it pours / Did you know the new White was Orange?” he rapped over the beat that was produced by ShawnSki. Nobody really knows why he always looks that way, but I think Business Insider maybe had the best theory, that it’s either an issue with tanning beds, a spray tan, or the makeup that he puts on top of a tan.
The other line that Cube said, “Boy you showing your horns…” perhaps suggests that at the time the song was released that Trump was putting his most devilish ways on display to the American public.
