Fat Joe Responds to Criticism of His N-Word Use
Fat Joe is addressing criticism he's received for his use of the N-word.
On Tuesday (Oct. 4), Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club aired an interview with Fat Joe, who hosts the 2022 BET Hip Hop Awards, which airs tonight. During the candid talk, Joey Crack was asked about criticism he's received recently for using the N-word throughout his career and he gave a lengthy explanation as to why the word is in his vocabulary.
"First of all, my projects is 90 percent, I’ll give you 80 percent, Black still," Joe said at the 29:55-mark of the interview. "My grandmother’s projects is 99.9 percent Black to be clear. So I’m Spanish. I knew I was Latino, but the whole time I thought I was Black anyway. So, my mom lives there 40 years before I was born, in this project, and I’m born blond hair, green eyes. This shit crazy, right? She brings me there, the first thing is they go, ‘Oh, look at this little nigga Joey. He got green eyes.’ The minute I’m walking, the guys in the building is like, ‘Yo, look at that little nigga Joe, little Fat Joe.’ That’s all I knew my whole life before even elementary."
He continued, "It’s a lot of woke society or something going on these days and Twitter and all that I guess they don’t understand where I come from, where I was born or how I was raised or how I lived my whole entire life. Now we know, we use it as love. We know that the record states that this is a negative word and I wish we never used it, you know? And I try my best ... I been saying this thing ... in my DNA. It's hard. Really, seriously I been trying to stop, but I been saying this since I was born. I tried the greatest level I can to try to understand if I'm offering anybody and that's cool."
Fat Joe said he could not be swayed to stop using the word.
"No one's going to pressure Fat Joe into [not] feeling or saying anything that he loves or believes in," he added. "No one's ever going to do that. You get one life and nobody gonna try to tell me what to say, tell me do, tell me what to think."
Every once in a while on social media, the question will arise as to why Fat Joe, who is Puerto Rican, gets a pass when it comes to using the N-word. The moments tend to go viral. In 2019, Remy Ma defended Fat Joe's use of the word.
"I know his whole family," Remy said on Revolt TV's State of the Culture. "This didn't happen when he decided to become a rapper or [an] artist. 'Yeah, I'm gonna use the word nigga because this sounds cool.'... He's Black. Like, that's it."
Earlier this year, Fat Joe called Joe Rogan a "piece of shit" after a video montage of the famous podcaster saying the N-word over and over surfaced.
