Photo Credit: DaBaby/TikTok
Four days after rapper DaBaby’s comments at Rolling Loud festival and GLAAD has released a statement condemning the Kirk rapper. “The rhetoric that DaBaby used is inaccurate, hurtful, and harmful to the LGBTQ community and the estimated 1.2 million Americans living with HIV,” DaShawn Usher, associate director of communities of color for GLAAD wrote via Twitter. “It is critical that DaBaby and his fans learn that people living with HIV today, when on effective treatment, lead long and healthy lives and cannot transmit HIV.”
“While DaBaby has made haphazard attempts to ‘apologize,’ actions need to be taken for full accountability and changes to do better in the future,” Usher continued. “It further confirms what GLAAD reported last year in the State of HIV Stigma Study that stigma and misinformation around HIV is widespread, and there is much work to be done to educate the public, including entertainers.”
Then there’s the music video that he released last night, Giving What it’s Supposed to Give which seems to have been made since all of this commotion started, but it didn’t. He finished filming for it the night before hitting the Rolling Loud festival but as he said in the caption on Instagram, it just happened to touch on the subjects that he’s being called out for at the Rolling Loud festival.
The problematic part of the video is him rapping about how he’s going to stay on your a** like AIDS and not come up off of it, while standing holding a sign with the word AIDS in giant letters. For one, it’s a weird visual and at least it explains why he brought it up at the Rolling Loud festival. The lyric was likely on his mind… despite its inappropriateness. On top of that, it was just weird.
And the video he released ended with an apology of him saying not to fight hate with hate and that he just wants to be him just like others want to be themselves. The problem with that is that there is no equivalence. You’re saying your homophobia is equivalent to people simply being gay. I’ve made the remark repeatedly lately that we have normalized homophobia to the point that it is simply deemed as normal and saying something about it clearly bothers people. His apology is the same as saying you’re sorry for offending another party, not for what you actually said.
All he had to do was have a member of his team write an apology for him and just stay off of social media the next 24 hours. Unfortunately, people like him just make things worse by opening their mouths.
