Snoop Dogg has labelled the NBA and the NFL “racist” because of the lack of Black people owning teams despite the number of Black players.
In an interview with the New York Times, Snoop Dogg was asked about Black NBA players like Steph Curry and Kevin Durrant who have been investing in start-up businesses. Snoop himself has pursued several entrepreneurial projects, including starting his own cannabis company and realising his own lines of gin and red wine.
“[Athletes including Steph Curry and Kevin Durrant] understand that they got to get it,” said Snoop.
“I mean, you would think that those businesspeople up top would say: ‘You know what? It’s time to change the world. We’ve got to stop treating Black people like they’re less. They’re always the ones who do the hard work, the groundwork, but we never cut them in.’”
He continued: “Why don’t we have an owner in an NFL? That’s just racist. Period, point-blank. We need to own an NFL team.”
“We got one half-owner in the NBA, Michael Jordan. But the whole league is 90 per cent Black. So we still the slaves and they still the masters.”
Snoop continued on to contrast professional sport with the music industry, where he says Black artists “took the initiative to say, ‘fuck that’.
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“We’re the masters, and we own our masters. We’re going to negotiate with you the way we think it should be. We changed that industry years ago, with our mentality of having our own labels,” he said.
When asked whether he thinks streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music are treating artists fairly, he explained that musicians only get a “little bit amount of money” per stream.
“I just don’t understand the dynamics of those numbers, and how they can create these systems without Black people up top, while Black people are the ones generating the most money from these systems through the music,” he said.”
“They always cut us out. They call Snoop after they got their companies up and are like, ‘Hey, Snoop, you want to be a brand ambassador?’ I want some equity. Give me a piece of the pie. If I can’t get no equity, fuck you and your company.”
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