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4 days ago
- General
- Buzz Feed
Old Photo Reveals Truth About Missing Mom
I tried not to stare when I first saw her. Her gaunt, heavily lined face made her look older than I expected. She wore a dingy pumpkin-orange thrift-store turtleneck that swallowed her 5-foot-7, 98-pound frame. But her ice-blue eyes sparkled like a kid's on Christmas morning. 'Oh boy! Oh boy,' she said, walking toward me with outstretched arms. 'It's so good to see you!' That was the first of many visits. Most followed the same script: her astonished joy upon my arrival, my mechanical hug, and then sitting on her couch to talk about her favorite topic, classic torch love songs from the 1950s and early '60s. 'Who's the better singer?' I'd ask. 'Frank Sinatra or Nat King Cole?' She'd close her eyes to ponder. 'Nat King Cole,' she'd announce, nodding in reverence. After about an hour, I'd stand to leave. Her smile would evaporate. Another awkward hug. As I left, she'd call out, 'Don't take any wooden nickels.' On the surface, we had nothing in common. She was a white Irish Catholic woman who grew up in a famil y that freely used the N-word, thought that Black people were lazy, and believed that Black and white people should live apart. I was a young Black man who grew up primarily in foster homes in a Black inner-city neighborhood where just about everyone — including me — regarded white people with distrust or contempt. Yet she was my mother. And, as the years have passed, she's become something else. She's the person I find myself turning to when I struggle with the mixture of emotions that so many Americans are experiencing right now. Many of us are exhausted, demoralized, and drained by constant political and racial divisions. Countless Americans have become, as author David Brooks put it in a recent essay, 'passive, discouraged. … They've lost the confidence to wish for more.' I've been swimming in this grim national mood for years. As a journalist at CNN and elsewhere, I've covered virtually every so-called racially transformative event in America during the past 32 years, from the Rodney King riots in 1992 to the George Floyd 'racial reckoning.' All of them generated massive hope for transformational change; all were followed by a massive letdown. At my lowest moments, I've wondered whether human beings are too susceptible to racism and tribalism to make democracy work. But my mother offered another way to look at the future, without ever intending to do so. She was a person who seemed to have no power or reason to hope. Still she, and others like her, gave me the confidence to wish for more. *** In the beginning, I thought I'd never know her. When I was born in the mid-1960s, interracial marriage and intimate interracial relationships were illegal in Maryland, as in much of the country. My mother vanished from my life not long after I was born, and so did her family. No one told me why. I didn't know what she looked like. My father's name was on my birth certificate, but hers was not. All he told me and my younger brother, Patrick, was this: 'Your mother's name is Shirley, she's white, and her family hates Black people.' Their hatred did not surprise me. I grew up in a West Baltimore neighborhood that served as the setting for the HBO series ,, a crime drama that depicted a Black inner-city community ravaged by racism and drug violence. I routinely heard my friends and neighbors refer to white people as 'honkies' and 'crackers.' I heard white people yell 'Nigger!' when I strayed into their neighborhoods. During my entire time in Baltimore's public schools — from Head Start to high school graduation — I saw only one white student. It wasn't the time or place to be biracial. There were no biracial public figures like former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Kamala Harris when I grew up in the 1970s and early '80s. I was too ashamed to tell anyone my mother was white. I marked her race as 'Black' on school forms. I became a closeted biracial person. At 17, though, I discovered that there was one place worse than my neighborhood: where I first met my mom. There was another reason why I tried not to stare when I first saw her. I was trying to hide my emotions because I was in shock. I was standing in the waiting room of a psychiatric facility called Crownsville Hospital Center in rural Maryland. My mother had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, a severe mental illness. I didn't make that discovery until I met her in Crownsville. No one in my family, including my father, had told me — not even on the car ride to the hospital. They didn't know how. My father had waited until I had graduated from high school to suddenly ask me one day if I wanted to meet my mom. He didn't think I could handle knowing about her illness until I became a young man. Many people didn't talk openly about mental illness in their families when I met my mother in the early 1980s. For over 30 years, I blocked out most of the memories from that first meeting, but one detail lingered. Before I left, my mother looked at me and made a request. 'Will you send me a St. Jude prayer book?' she asked. 'Ah, yeah, I will,' I said, not knowing at the time that St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes. Outwardly, I didn't skip a beat after that meeting. I attended and graduated from Howard University, a historically Black college in Washington, D.C., where Kamala Harris was a classmate. I became a journalist at several newspapers before joining CNN. But I had stepped out of one closet into another. Now, I was ashamed that my mother had a mental illness. I didn't even tell my closest friends. It took two years to tell the woman I would date and marry about my mom's illness — and another two into our marriage before allowing them to meet. In the life I hid from others, I tried to build a relationship with my mom. I wrote her a flood of letters, telling her about myself, my dreams and my hope that we could get to know each other. There would be no reply for months, and then a letter would finally arrive. I'd tear it open to find a single sheet from a yellow legal pad, with large cursive letters spilling over the margins: ' Dear John! I could use some money and to see you in person. Could you send a picture of yourself and Pat for Mother's Day? I need another St. Jude prayer book. Love, Shirley. ' Personal visits were no better. She would drift away in the middle of conversations. She'd forget what we talked about two minutes earlier. Her lips would tremble, and she'd lapse into silence if I asked too many questions about her past. At times, she'd sense my frustration, turn to me and say with a rueful smile, 'Don't mind me. I'm crazy.' Each visit left me more depressed. My mother had been a mystery when I had no contact with her — and even more so once she was in my life. Her mental illness was like a thick fog; I didn't know how to navigate around it to see her. All I could see was schizophrenia. In my 30s, I gave up. I stopped writing her letters and trying to reach her through conversations. I kept visiting her and mailing her St. Jude trinkets, but I was just checking a box. Our visits were filled with awkward silences. I didn't expect our relationship to change. One day, when my wife, Terry, asked me why I didn't talk more about my mother, I cut her off. 'All I do is send her money,' I said with a heavy sigh. 'I can't really communicate with her. There's nothing left to tell.' *** But there was so much to her story that had not been told. One night, when I was about 19, my father reached into a Ziploc bag and pulled out a sepia-stained black-and-white photo. In the photo, a young white woman with a beehive hairdo looked at the camera with a wide, dimpled smile. She was holding a cigarette in her right hand and looked like she was about to burst into laughter. She looked confident, and her eyes sparkled with intelligence and mischief. It was my mother. The photo was taken when she was 20, the same year she gave birth to me. I couldn't stop staring at the photo. It bore little resemblance to the fragile woman I knew. I set out to learn about the woman in that photo. I pressed relatives to talk about my parents' relationship. I knew the outline: They met in 1963 at a hospital in downtown Baltimore. My mother was a nurse's assistant, and my father, Clifton Sr., was in the Merchant Marines. Their first date was a disaster. My father couldn't persuade a Black cabdriver to take him to my mom's house because she lived in a white working-class neighborhood where no Blacks dared venture. When my father finally did knock on her door, her father answered. He tried to shove my father off the doorstep and called the police. 'This nigger is trying to see my daughter,' my mother's father told the arriving officers. They arrested my father for disturbing the peace. My mother decided that she would visit my father instead. She started taking walks toward my father's house in West Baltimore, which was the central meeting place for my father's extended family. My relatives described her as 'quick-witted,' 'chatty' and driven to help people in need. She sat on my father's front steps, smoking Marlboro cigarettes with my uncles, and hung out in the kitchen to watch my paternal grandmother, Daisy, sing Negro spirituals while baking sweet potato pies. My father's family didn't know what to make of her. In the early 1960s, white politicians routinely warned against the evils of 'race-mixing.' Psychiatrists declared in scholarly journals that whites who married or 'mated' with Blacks had a death wish or sought an outlet for 'deviant' sexual urges. Baltimore passed the nation's first racially restrictive housing law in 1910, which banned Black people from buying homes in white neighborhoods and vice versa, and was heavily segregated when my parents met. My father's relatives chuckled as they recalled a 20-year-old white woman walking alone into an all-Black neighborhood to see a Black man. 'It was like a breakthrough,' my cousin Reese recalled. 'She was a white woman on the block, not scared, not worried about being attacked, not looking over her shoulder. She didn't seem to be conscious of her color. She was like one of the family.' I then heard stories that filled a hole in my heart that I didn't even know was there. Unprompted, relatives recounted memories of a doting young mom who took her two children on walks in the park, rubbed her nose against their bellies while they giggled and sang Patsy Cline and Tony Bennett songs to them. My mom loved to sing one song in particular to me, Doris Day's ' Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).' Try as I might, though, I have no memories of those moments. Mercifully, I also have no memory of what happened next. My mother's illness became apparent after she gave birth to Patrick, nine months after I was born. She started drifting away during conversations, chain-smoking and disappearing for long solitary walks. She couldn't keep a job. When my parents moved into an apartment together, she'd leave with the gas stove on or the front door ajar. My parents never married. 'She tried, but she didn't have the capacity to do normal things,' my father told me. 'She wanted to be accepted like normal people.' And then one day, my relatives said, she disappeared. Years later, Patrick accidentally discovered the reason why while consulting her Social Security records. Her father had placed her in a psychiatric facility, a not uncommon fate in the 1950s and early 1960s for white women in interracial relationships. Hearing how my parents' relationship ended left me emotionally numb. I no longer wanted to know more about my mother — every story seemed to end in tragedy. I thought I would never meet any semblance of the vibrant woman in that old photograph. But there was another side to those stories about my mom that I had overlooked. It was her 'marvelous victory.' *** Part of that victory can be seen in a viral photograph from last year that is now forgotten because the news cycle has moved on. It's a snapshot of Kamala Harris taken last summer during her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. It was shot from the point of view of a brown biracial girl in a pink pantsuit and pigtails, transfixed as she gazes upward at Harris from the front row at the United Center in Chicago. The girl is Amara, Harris' great-niece, age 8. It's easy to see why the photo went viral. It was a sneak preview of a Brown New America. The U.S. is projected to become a majority-minority country (the majority of citizens will be non-white) by 2044. The number of people who identify as multiracial increased by 276% over the past decade. Advertisements today routinely depict interracial couples, straight and gay, along with their children. And some of our most prominent public figures — Obama, Harris, film director Jordan Peele and NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes — are biracial. The acceptance of interracial marriage cuts across racial and partisan lines. Harris and Doug Emhoff, her Jewish husband, were the first interracial couple to reach the highest levels of the executive branch, but they were immediately followed by another interracial couple, GOP Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants. Some white supremacists objected to Usha Vance's race but even within the MAGA universe there is widespread acceptance of the Vances' interracial marriage. Someday, perhaps soon, an interracial couple will occupy the White House. It's easy to miss, but Usha Vance's ascension and Harris' groundbreaking run for the White House represents one of the greatest victories of the Civil Rights Movement: the normalization of interracial marriage and biracial people throughout America. When Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in as a Supreme Court justice in 2022, few if any news stories dwelled on the fact that her husband is white. The casual acceptance of interracial couples at even the highest echelon of American life demonstrates something that's so important to remember today: how quickly people's attitudes on seemingly intractable issues can shift. When a Gallup poll asked Americans about their views on marriage between Black and white people in 1958, only 4% approved. Gallup asked the same question in 2021, and 94% approved — an all-time high. Public opinion about one of the most entrenched racial taboos in American history went from near-universal disapproval to virtual universal approval within a lifetime. How did this happen? The quick answer is that in June 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down 'anti-miscegenation' laws in the Loving v. Virginia case. But something else also made it happen. It was a choice that certain people made and a type of courage they all displayed. One of them was my mom. I only saw my mom as this fragile flower, but my brother, Patrick, was the first to notice another side to her. One morning, he took her to a hair salon that served women in a group home where our mom lived. She had been transferred to the home with other women with severe mental illnesses after Crownsville was shut down, in part, for mistreating patients. While they were waiting, our mom watched a hairdresser berate and throw hair products at a woman sitting in her chair. 'She's a bitch,' my mom said, her eyes narrowed on the hairdresser. Patrick had never heard our mother speak in such an indignant tone before. He suppressed a smile. 'Mom, do you know you just said a bad word?' 'I'm sorry, Pat.' Our mom briefly paused, then added, 'But she is a bitch.' As I dug deeper into old family stories, I discovered that my mom had long been infuriated by any display of injustice. She glared back at white people who stared at her while she walked in public with my father in the early 1960s. Sometimes she'd say, 'You act like you ain't never seen people before.' She and my father trashed a bar when the bartender refused to serve them. Once, I heard my mom say she had been arrested as a young woman. For what, I inquired. 'For opening my big fat mouth,' she said with a wide grin. Even her illness couldn't erase her spirit of defiance. I hated visiting her group homes. Some were run by good people who treated my mom with compassion, but many seemed designed to crush whatever humanity was left of those consigned there. Unscrupulous caretakers stole from or bullied people in their care. Some confined them to squalid, roach-infested rooms. When I came in to greet my mom, I'd often see heavily medicated residents sitting on couches, staring zombie-like at soap operas on television. Most of them hadn't received a visitor in years. There were few smiles or genuine laughter in these environments. But my mom could somehow bring light into the most desolate places. Patrick sneaked into a group home to surprise our mom one morning, only to be shocked by what he saw: our mother bopping and weaving down a 'Soul Train' dance line as the group home staff and residents cheered her on. Any gifts we sent her quickly disappeared because, we discovered, she gave most of them away to other group home members who she said needed them more. And when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, her caretaker had to buy a separate living room chair for my mom to enforce social distancing rules. All of the group home members wanted to sit near her. I didn't appreciate the depth of her defiance until I was in my mid-50s, when I did something that I had never done: I traveled to her childhood home in Baltimore. On an overcast summer morning, I drove to Mill Hill, my mother's childhood community. She lived on Wilkins Avenue, on a quintessential Baltimore block of gleaming marble steps, neat row houses and a still-stately St. Benedict Church, where my mom was confirmed. I parked my rental car and walked to the spot where my father had been assaulted and arrested for trying to date my mother over 50 years ago. I scanned the street to see white, Black and brown neighbors talking to one another from their front steps and hanging out together at a corner tavern. I was surprised by something other than the racial mix. When I looked at my smartphone's app, I was stunned to discover that my father's former home was only 4.1 miles away. I had no idea that my estranged white and Black relatives had lived so close to one another. Racial segregation was so entrenched when my parents met that their families might as well have lived in separate solar systems. Baltimore's segregation wasn't just racial; it was also ethnic. Jews, Italians and Poles kept to their neighborhoods. Outsiders, particularly those who had the 'wrong' color, risked getting hurt walking into the wrong area. As I stood in front of my mom's childhood home, I imagined for the first time what it must have been like for her. The contemporary Wilkins Avenue landscape dissolved, and the circa early 1960s Wilkins Avenue appeared. I saw her — a thin, young white woman with a beehive hairdo — close the front door and walk toward a neighborhood to meet people her family and community had told her to hate. I paused outside my car and shook my head in admiration, and confusion. Damn, I thought. Why would she take such a risk? I'm still not quite sure. Was my mother's relationship with my father driven by youthful rebellion, the allure of a taboo relationship, or was it an early symptom of the illness that would engulf her? Or was it truly love? I learned through others that my parents remained close after she was institutionalized. My father routinely visited my mother and continued to take care of her even when his health began to fail late in his life. What I do know is that she did something that remains so important: She refused to accept the status quo. My mother was part of a vanguard of Black, brown and white people who would smash a taboo against interracial relationships that had been enshrined as law for centuries. They didn't wait for the Supreme Court or politicians to tell them whom to love. I was born four years before the Loving decision. Like most big changes, it started small, with countless acts of invisible courage from everyday people. My mother's decision to walk from Wilkins Avenue to my father's house ' sent forth a tiny ripple of hope.' That ripple fed into another, emboldening others to do the same. Those ripples eventually turned into a tsunami that gave us the Loving decision and a New America — one where a brown girl in a pink pantsuit could look at a biracial woman making a credible run for the White House or another brown woman at the White House today and think, 'That could be me one day.' This was the same dynamic that gave us marriage equality. Everyday people acted first, coming out to their parents, friends and co-workers; the politicians and courts followed later. As I returned to my car and drove away from Wilkins Avenue, I smiled. I felt a warm sensation well up in my chest, and something else that I'd never felt before about my mom: pride. Pride that I was her son. She was no hopeless cause. She was more powerful than she realized. She, and others like her, helped make Usha Vance and Kamala Harris possible. The historian and activist Howard Zinn said there is a tendency among people 'to think that what we see in the present moment will continue.' He said people often forget how often throughout history people have been astonished by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, and 'by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible.' He said that if people only look at the worst in the past and present, it destroys their capacity to act. 'And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future,' Zinn wrote. 'The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.' *** After Wilkins Avenue, my visits to my mom changed. I painted her fingernails. I asked her to sing 'Que Sera Sera.' I asked her to show me some dance moves. And I laughed along with her as she did a little shimmy of her hips. I stopped dwelling on what I had lost; I became grateful for what remained. My wife noticed. 'You used to hug your mom like she was an eggshell and get frustrated when you couldn't talk to her the way you wanted,' Terry told me one night. 'And now?' I asked her. 'You hug her tighter now, and you're not afraid of the silence when you talk to her.' During one of my last visits with my mom, Terry took a photo that I treasure. We stopped by my mother's group home in Baltimore on a luminous summer day with oak trees in full bloom. That visit followed the same script: a ring of the doorbell, the scurrying of footsteps behind the front door, and my mom gleefully shouting, 'Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord!' Terry's smartphone camera snapped what happened after the front door swung open. I leaned forward and wrapped my arms around my mother as she pillowed her face on my shoulder, a contented smile on her face. If I could have written a caption for that photo, it would be the final words I wrote to her not long after that visit — words that she never saw. It's what I wished I could have said to her so many years earlier. ' Now I see you, Mom. I finally see you.' John Blake is an award-winning journalist for He is the author of 'More Than I Imagined: What a Black Man Discovered About the White Mother He Never Knew.' Blake's memoir has won five book awards, including the 2024 Christopher Awards, which celebrates books that 'affirm the highest values of the human spirit.' Blake has spoken at colleges, symposiums and in documentaries on race, religion and politics. He is a graduate of Howard University and a native of Baltimore. For more info, visit his website. This story originally ran on HuffPost in February 2025 and was re-published on June 12, 2025 — the 58th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision, as part of HuffPost Personal's 'Best Of' series today.
New York Post
6 days ago
- Health
- New York Post
Jamaal Bowman blames black health issues on being called the N-word ‘every day'
Ex-New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman is blaming the higher rate of chronic diseases among the black community on being called the 'N-word directly or indirectly every day.' The far-left former 'Squad' member theorized during a roundtable discussion on 'CNN NewsNight,' where he grew animated when referring to 'America's original sin and its disease of hate and racism towards black and brown people,' at times raising his voice. Far-left ex-New York Congressman Jamaal Bowman had an animated appearance on 'CNN NewsNight' in which he blamed chronic health issues in the black community on racism. CNN Advertisement He also hit out on Republicans as a whole, scolding White House official Marc Short for what he views as the sins of the party. 'Your colleagues in the Republican Party do not hold each other accountable when it comes to the racism that comes from the party on a consistent basis,' he erupted, talking over Short. 'You can't be calm about this! I'm a black man in America! The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the N-word directly or indirectly every day,' he alleged. Advertisement 'If your colleagues would listen and try to learn and engage and grow, and stop being so hateful, we could have a better country, but unfortunately we're still here.' Former Republican California Lt. Gov. Abel Maldonado, striking a calmer tone, attempted to reason with Bowman. 'I understand where you're coming from, sincerely, I really really do, it happens on both sides Jamaal, you might think it happens more on your side … you should see my Twitter feed,' he said before Bowman interrupted, closing his eyes for dramatic effect. 'We have cops beating black people to death,' he wailed. Advertisement Bowman has a history of questionable statements and antics, including pulling a Capitol Hill fire alarm during a government shutdown vote in 2023. Getty Images Bowman, known for unhinged antics like pulling a Capitol Hill fire alarm during a government shutdown vote in 2023, lost his seat in the 16th Congressional District last year to Westchester County Executive George Latimer. Leading up to the election, Bowman held a rally in the Bronx with fellow 'Squad' member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in which the former congressman bellowed 'we're gonna show them who the f–k we are! We are gonna show f–king AIPAC the power of the motherf–king South Bronx!' He also chanted his own name before grabbing a stool from the stage, waving it in the air and slamming it down on the ground.
Black America Web
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Drake Called Out For Suprise Appearance At N-Word Abuser Morgan Wallen's Concert In Houston
Source: Getty Images / Morgan Wallen / Drake Drake seems to enjoy aligning himself with controversial figures. Drizzy has been feeling the heat on social media after making a surprise appearance with country music star Morgan Wallen in Houston. Drake did not perform, but he did walk with Wallen, along with another problematic individual, due to his alleged PED use, legendary MLB pitcher, Roger Clemens, to the stage. Following the moment, Wallen shared a video recap to the tune of this song, 'Underground Kings,' on his Instagram account. So why is Drake getting slammed for this, you ask? For those who may have forgotten, Wallen got caught out here saying the N-word in 4K. Wallen did apologize for using the slur, but he also gained popularity from a particular bunch of people, basically Trump-loving white folk. Social media, specifically the Black section, has not forgotten and is calling out Drake for aligning himself with a person who expressed no chill when using the N-word. Oh, and to make matters worse, this is not the first time Drizzy has gotten cozy with a N-word abuser; he has also been a frequent guest on popular streamer Adin Ross' Kick page, who also got caught up in controversy after being caught using the slur. Users on X, formerly Twitter, have been roasting the 6 God, reminding him of his egregious use of Black face that Pusha-T blasted him for on his diss track, 'The Story of Adidon.' They also haven't forgotten about Wallen's past transgressions. Some are even referring to Kendrick Lamar's scathing diss record, 'Not Like Us,' where the Compton rapper accurately rapped, 'You ain't a colleague, you a f*cking colonizer.' Damn Drizzy, you seriously need to learn how to read a room. You can see more reactions in the gallery below. Drake Called Out For Suprise Appearance At N-Word Abuser Morgan Wallen's Concert In Houston was originally published on
Black America Web
24-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Black America Web
Drake Gets Flamed For Popping Out At A Morgan Wallen Concert Over Past N-Word Use
Since Drake purchased a $15 million home in Houston last year, he has further adopted the Texas culture, which includes embracing country music. So over the weekend, he popped up at one of Morgan Wallen's NRG Stadium stops in Houston for the singer's I'm The Problem Tour. Wallen has a pre-show ritual of bringing his famous friends along with him on his walk to the stage, and the crowd watching from the Jumbotron erupted when he dapped up Drake, who went full country garb, rocking an all-denim outfit, cowboy boots, and had a flask in his hand. Before Drizzy joined him, baseball legend Roger Clemens —who came out of retirement to suit up for the Houston Astros in the early 2000s— walked with him in unison and presented him with a custom Astros jersey. During the ceremonious walkout, Wallen's 'Broadway Girls' track , featuring Lil Durk, a friend of Drake's, played in the background . Wallen also performed at NRG Stadium the night before, bringing out NFL legend and former Houston Texan Andre Johnson and Houston businessman Jim 'Mattress Mack' McIngvale on Friday before stepping up the star power for night two. This isn't the first time the big artists have linked up, as the Tennessee native was in the video for Drake's 'You Broke My Heart' in 2023. While concert goers loved Drake showing love, social media was immediately critiquing the move as problematic because Wallen was flamed in 2021 when TMZ caught him on camera saying the N-word after a night out with friends. After being suspended from his recording contract, he later apologized, asking fans not to excuse his actions, and pledging $300,000 to t he Black Music Action Coalition . 'I'm embarrassed and sorry. I used an unacceptable and inappropriate racial slur that I wish I could take back,' Wallen said in a statement. 'There are no excuses to use this type of language, ever. I want to sincerely apologize for using the word. I promise to do better.' But social media still sees it as a weird culture vulture move from Drake to be aware of his N-word use and still hanging out with him. See the reactions below. Drake Gets Flamed For Popping Out At A Morgan Wallen Concert Over Past N-Word Use was originally published on
Express Tribune
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Express Tribune
Drake under fire for Houston cameo with controversial country star
Drake is facing widespread criticism after making a surprise appearance with country singer Morgan Wallen during a recent show in Houston. The move has sparked outrage in the Hip-Hop community due to Wallen's past use of a racial slur, which resurfaced in public discourse following Drake's onstage walkout. Drake x Morgan Wallen 🔥 — Drake Charts ⁶𓅓 (@DrakeChart) June 23, 2025 Appearing alongside Wallen and former baseball star Roger Clemens, the Toronto rapper quickly went viral—not for music, but for what many saw as poor optics. Critics accused Drake of aligning with Wallen to tap into his fanbase, despite Wallen's controversial history. Drake and Morgan Wallen in Houston — Drake Direct (@DrakeDirect_) June 22, 2025 Wallen was recorded in 2021 using the N-word outside his home, which led to major fallout including suspension from his label and removal from radio and streaming platforms. Though he has since returned to touring and recording, the incident remains a sore point for many fans and artists. Social media users expressed disappointment in Drake's decision. One post referenced Kendrick Lamar's diss track 'Not Like Us,' highlighting Drake's alleged exploitation of Black culture. Others pointed to a pattern of questionable behavior, citing Drake's recent lyrical jab at Kendrick about 'rapping like you tryna free the slaves,' and linking it to his appearance with Wallen. The Black community booted Drake all the way to Morgan Wallen!!! We all knew Kendrick won, but this a different level of victory — JimmyDean (@JimmyDean407) June 22, 2025 Beggin' Morgan Wallen, boy, you not fvckin' beatin' us — yaya (@PhucShuMeanMane) June 22, 2025 In what world did Drake think it was a good idea to associate himself with Morgan 'N Word' Wallen — Spectre (@spectre0799) June 22, 2025 Now watch drake fans support morgan wallen and do damage control knowing fully well he's a racist pos ..... Stan culture has a disease — A BIG STEPPER✍️🗿 (@dex_osas) June 22, 2025 Morgan Wallen is racist. We must cancel Drake. We must also cancel any Black artist or Producer associated with Eminem — BLA$$$IC 💿✌🏿 (@blassicliberal) June 23, 2025 Some Hip-Hop commentators labeled the move a "betrayal," arguing it distances Drake further from the genre that built his career. Others viewed it as a desperate attempt to remain relevant following his highly publicized feud with Lamar. While Wallen has previously invited big-name guests during his tour, none have drawn backlash to the extent Drake has experienced. Fans and critics alike continue to debate the implications of the appearance.
