Stephen Colbert invited Killer Mike from Run The Jewels on his show on Wednesday, January 6 to talk about racial justice, family, and feeling the “Bern.” Killer Mike is a socially active leader in the African-American community who uses his music as a conscious platform to discuss issues like police brutality and the war on drugs.

Killer Mike spoke freely about the oppression of African-Americans in recent months, as it relates to police brutality. “If white people are just now discovering that it’s bad for black working class people in America, they are a lot more blind than I thought. They are a lot more [choosing to be] ignorant than I thought. The same problems that we are discussing today, we discussed in 1990, 1980, 1970, and 1960.”

During his dialogue with Colbert, Killer Mike briefly touched upon the famous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” exercise by Jane Elliott which labels participants as inferior or superior based only on the color of their eyes. This exercise helps others experience firsthand what it feels like to be a minority.

The Guardian created a database, called The Counted, which displays the number of deaths by police in the United States. In 2015, there were 1,138 people killed by cops, and 302 of them were African-American including Jamar Clark, Corey Jones, Christian Taylor, Samuel DuBose, and more.

Besides his conversation on police brutality, Killer Mike expressed an unprecedented level of advocacy for Bernie Sanders because he “is the only politician who has consistently, for 50 years, taken that social justice platform to politics.” The opportunity to elect Sanders, in Killer Mike’s opinion, is important because there have been very few, if any, politicians with an honest agenda filled with tactics to better the poor, Black, Hispanic, and LGBT communities alongside women.

“This opportunity in history is not going to come for another 20 years,” Killer Mike boldly proclaimed.

As of now, Sanders has 32.7% of the National Democratic vote behind Clinton according to the Huffington Post Pollster, which was updated on January 7, 2016. Sanders’ issues including raising the federal minimum wage to $15, expanding social security, restoring community in America by guaranteeing every employee twelve weeks of paid family and medical leave, and more.

(Photo by Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images)

Author

  • Travis Henry is a senior at Rutgers University studying Communication, with a concentration in Strategic Public Relations and Public Communication, and French. Currently, he is looking at the relationship between consumer brands and African-American youth and how the Black-white racial segregation has manifested online. When he is not doing research at school or writing at work, he finds himself “curating the human experience” via his magazine DWNTWN and editing his school’s magazine Voice. He sees himself in the future finding a career that hybrids music, activism, media, and writing.