Atlanta, GA – Lecrae is facing some serious backlash after sitting down with Atlanta megachurch pastor Louie Giglio and Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy for a “honest conversation about race on the church” on Sunday (June 14).
As Giglio is speaking, he implores viewers to look at the “blessing of slavery,” while Lecrae sits there silently nodding his head.
“It actually built up the framework for the world that white people live in and lived in,” Giglio says. “A lot of people call this white privilege and when you say those two words, it just is like a fuse goes off for a lot of white people because they don’t want anybody to check their privilege. I know that you and I both have struggled in these days with … hey, if the phrase is the trip up, let’s get over the phrase and let’s get down to the heart.
“Let’s get down to what then do you want to call it? I think maybe a great thing for me is to call it white blessing, that I’m living in the blessing of the curse that happened generationally that allowed me to grow up in Atlanta.”
While Lecrae attempted to have a productive dialogue with Giglio, he ultimately started to use the term “white blessing” interchangeably.
“The notion of this kind of blessing or the ability to put the blinders on is because what my white brothers and sisters tend to think is they don’t have a culture and that is an indicator of this blessing, this privilege,” he replies. “… I also think putting themselves in a positions where they have to learn from their black brothers and sisters, where they have to find people in leadership that they have to say, ‘This is the voice that I gotta listen to because I don’t know … and I’ve gotta be OK with saying ‘I don’t know.’”
Twitter immediately pounced on the Christian-leaning rapper and chided him for not speaking up the second the words “blessing of slavery” popped out of Giglio’s mouth. Subsequently, Lecrae became a trending topic on the social media platform on Tuesday (June 16).
Check out some of the reactions below.