Lil Baby Shares His Own Police Brutality Experience
Yesterday, Rolling Stone unveiled that Lil Baby was the cover star of the publication’s August 2020 issue and, in his accompanying profile, the Atlanta rap star opened up about some of his own personal run-ins with the law.
Before breaking out as a rapper, the 25-year-old spent two years behind bars due to a drug charge.
“I’ve been a victim of police brutality,” Lil Baby told the publication. “I’ve been in prison where white officers control you. I’ve been in a court system where white judges give you a different time than they would give someone white. There have been times I had a physical altercation with an officer, and he then grabbed me and took me to a room where there’s no camera. We had a physical altercation and left me in a room for about an hour. I’m in there yelling and screaming. I’m so accustomed to it, we don’t even make it no big deal.”
“Where we come from, we’ve got so accustomed to something going wrong,” he continued. “Ain’t nothing we gon’ be able to do about it. I’m from Atlanta, where they had a unit of police that got dismantled for police brutality. The Red Dogs got dismantled for using way too much force...That s**t an everyday thing where I’m from.”
Further into the interview, Lil Baby elaborated on his thoughts behind his single, “The Bigger Picture,” which he released in response to the recent protests that were sparked by the police killing of George Floyd, telling Rolling Stone, “just ’cause you work in a racist system doesn’t mean you racist.”
“D**n near every system that got a job is a racist system. You know what I mean? CEOs be like old white people. You never know, they got to be some kind of racist ’cause at some certain age, your parent, that was the way of life almost. So I almost feel like all these corporations or whatnot may be racist,” he explained, adding that Black people can be racist too.
“To me, a racist is someone who treats a different race than theirs a different way than they would treat theirs. I feel like if you’re a black person and you treat all black people one way and all white people one way, you’re racist,” Baby expounded. “I’m not a racist, so I give a white person a chance to talk and actually we get into it before I can say I don’t like you or not. And I feel the same way about a black person. You ain’t gon’ be my buddy just ’cause you’re black. Just straight up.”
Read the rest of Lil Baby’s Rolling Stone cover story here.
