Cam’ron has turned a portion of the Season 3 premiere of his sports talk show It Is What It Is into a monologue on his views on racial classification.
About halfway through the show’s most recent episode, Cam’ron began talking to co-host Ma$e about race and sports fandom. That led Killa Cam into an extended speech about why he thought of himself as a “Black American” as opposed to an “African American.”
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“I’d rather fill in ‘Black’ than ‘African American’ [on I.D. forms] because Africans don’t even fuck with us,” he began.
“[When] you go over there [to Africa], they call us ‘yankees.’ They fuck with us, but we’re not from the Motherland. We’re from America. So I’d rather say I’m a Black American.”
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Cam then used the Olympics as an example to further his point.
“When we go to the Olympics, as a country, and somebody Black is fighting from the United States, you don’t say ‘African American.’ You say ‘American.’ You don’t even put a color on it. It’s an American fighter… You’re known in the Olympics as an American. It doesn’t matter what color you are…”
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He continued: “The point is, they don’t categorize it when it’s world competition, but when it’s other shit, it needs to be categorized. So I consider myself a Black American. I don’t consider myself an African American.”
The rapper-slash-talk-show-host wound down by shouting out “all my n-ggas in Africa.”
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“Much love,” he added. “But y’all don’t consider us real Africans. Y’all don’t!”
You can see the whole segment beginning at the 40:34 mark below.
That same It Is What It Is episode began with a headline-making Cam freestyle.
Throughout the three-minute rap, Cam name-drops the likes of JAY-Z, Method Man,Mobb Deep, Ma$e, Donald Trump, LeBron James and more.
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Tobe Nwigwe dubbed the freestyle “masterful,” while Twista, Jazze Pha, Kareem “Biggs” Burke, Don C, D. Nice, Wayno, Affion Crockett and more showed love in the comment section.
The clip even inspired producer Conductor Williams to seek out Cam’s attention in hopes of manifesting a collaboration with the Dipset rapper in the future.
The latest episode of the increasingly popular show — which landed on HipHopDX‘s list of nominees for Best Hip Hop TV Shows of 2023 — also featured another controversial moment for Cam, who found himself in the hot seat after taking aim at Odell Beckham Jr.
On Thursday (January 4), a snippet of the new episode of It Is What It Is made its rounds on social media. During the segment, Ma$e and Cam, can be heard criticizing Odell Beckham Jr. and calling him “zesty.”
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The commentary was met with immediate backlash, with some viewers wondering where the industry vets find the time to reduce others.
