October 2, 2024
Gaines is the same host who was allegedly crying on the podcast shortly after it was demonetized by YouTube for violating the platform’s policies.
Myron “Fit” Gaines, a co-host of the misogynistic podcast Fresh & Fit, said on a recent episode of the podcast that Black people who want reparations are just looking to buy Jordans, chains, and drugs, a common anti-Black talking point.
According to Business Insider, Gaines is the same host who was allegedly crying on the podcast shortly after YouTube demonetized it for violating the platform’s policies for its YouTube Partner Program.
When a clip from the podcast was posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, Gaines was roasted by Black Twitter for his claims.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates made plain in his seminal long-form article for The Atlantic, The Case For Reparations, Black people are collectively owed recompense for a myriad of abuses perpetrated by the United States of America. The idea that Black people do not know how to spend money or will be irresponsible with the money they receive from the federal government is a vestige of the system of white supremacy.
Gaines’ words are also close to what a 2023 Slate excerpt of Johnny Smith’s book Jumpman: The Making and Meaning of Michael Jordan called a racist panic over Air Jordan sneakers created by the media in the 1990s.
Similar to Gaines’s comments, white reporters in the 1980s conjured up and inserted the idea in the national consciousness that Black teenagers were “super-predators” pursuing drugs, money, and whatever else they wanted using violent means. Nike’s Director of Public Relations Liz Dolan questioned those assumptions, slamming them as racist hysteria.
“What’s baffling to us,” Dolan said, “is how easily people accept the assumption that Black youth is an unruly mob that will do anything to get its hands on what it wants. They’ll say, ‘Show a Black kid something he wants, and he’ll kill for it.’ I think it’s racist hysteria.”
Gaines’ argument, therefore, fails when given scrutiny.
In 2020, Michelle Singletary discussed the racial wealth gap in a column for The Washington Post. “It’s a common misconception: Black people would be wealthier if they just didn’t spend so much on clothes, sneakers, and cars. Like so many other misrepresentations when it comes to Black people, reparations and how they spend and save, stereotypes supplant substantive analysis,” Singletary wrote.
As Darrick Hamilton, the founding director of the Institute for the Study of Race, Stratification, and Political Economy, told the Post, “For the vast majority of Americans, and especially for those who are wealthy, it is wealth that begets more wealth,” Hamilton said. “So, in other words, having the endowment, to begin with, puts you in an asset that’s going to passively appreciate, regardless of the decisions you make.”
Hamilton continued, “We can find instances in our history in which, even when Black people were able to acquire those assets, they were subject to confiscation, fraud, and theft because we remain politically vulnerable.”
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