Drake Responds To Blackface Controversy In New Statement

Drake has finally responded to Pusha T's scathing dis record "The Story of Adidon," yet not in the way most were predicting. Wednesday night (May 30), the Toronto rapper posted a statement on Instagram explaining the photo featuring him in blackface that Push used for the cover of his track.


"I know each person is enjoying the circus however I'd like to clarify this image in question," Drake wrote in a Instagram story. "This was not from a clothing brand shoot or my music career. This picture is from 2007, a time in my life where I was an actor and I was working on an assignment that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and type cast. The pictures represented how African Residents of the
U.S. Were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment."


Drizzy went onto explain that the photo, taken by photographer David Leyes, was segment of an assignment aimed at showing the frustrations that he and his best friend felt as black actors.


"Me and my best friend Mazin Elsadig who is also an actor from Sudan were trying to use our voice to bring awareness to the issues we dealt with all of the time as black actors at auditions," Graham continues. "This was to highlight and raise our frustrations with not habitually getting a fair chance in the industry and to prepare a point that the struggle for black actors had not changed much."


Since the photo was revealed, several people traced Drake's clothing in it to the streetwear brand Also Black Guys, which released a "Jim Crow Couture/House of Crow" collection in 2008. Nevertheless, the brand's founder, Adrian Aitcheson, issued a statement sharing that the corporation was not involved in the photo.


also Black Guys has a history of representing the black experience in a unapologetic way," Aitcheson wrote. Nevertheless this was not an image from any of our photoshoots, we feel that Drake, who is a long-time friend of the brand, was brilliantly illustrating the hypocrisy of the Jim Crow Era."


The current spat between Drake and Pusha T is one of the most ruthless in recent memory. Push's "Infrared" reignited a seven-year beef, which Graham was happy to respond to on "Duppy Freestyle." Unfortunately for Drake, a decade-old photo has rapidly taken over the narrative. It isn't daily that a rapper responds to beef with a written statement, yet at this point, it was unavoidable.