An Ice Cube Melts in Black America

Makeeda Caine has been an Ice Cube fan since she was young. But when she saw a post on Instagram saying that the rapper and actor had met with President Donald Trump’s campaign, she felt confused. “I was really concerned that he was selling out, just as some of these other rappers,” said Caine, 37, a Black woman in Brooklyn who believes that Trump is “a disgusting racist and narcissistic piece of  s…”

Like Caine, many people in the Black community were jarred when Trump’s senior advisor, Katrina Pierson, thanked the rapper on Twitter for working with Trump’s campaign.

“Shout out to @icecube for his willingness to stand up and work with @realDonaldTrump administration to help develop the Platinum Plan,” she tweeted. And even though the election is over and President Trump is on his way out, they are still mad.

According to Ice Cube, he met with the Trump campaign in late September to discuss the Contract for Black America (CWBA)  The rapper had not publicly mentioned the meeting until being outed by Pierson and becoming the number one top trending topic on the social media platform.

“Facts: I put out the CWBA. Both parties contacted me. Dems said we’ll address the CWBA after the election, the Trump campaign made some adjustments to their plan after talking to us about the CWBA,” he tweeted.

His response received backlash from his fan base and Black Twitter. “I think what upsets me the most was that Ice Cube has been telling us to withhold our vote and to question the Dems, whilst working with President Trump,” said Katherine Whyte, a Black woman from Los Angeles and an Ice Cube fan since he was in N.W.A. “It almost feels like he’s working with Trump to get us not to vote, or worse, vote for the racist Cheeto-in-chief. I feel betrayed.”

Ice Cube posts on Instagram the question some of his fans have been asking.

Now more than a month after President Donald Trump lost the election, Ice Cube still maintains he did some good for a plan that will never come to life since the current occupant of the White House, whose team he met with, will be leaving in mid-January.

“Let me get this straight, I get the president of the United States to agree to put over half a trillion dollars of capital in the Black Community (without an endorsement) and n—- are mad at me?…have a nice life,” tweeted Ice Cube.

Radio host and journalist Roland Martin replied to Ice Cube’s tweet with, “The only problem @icecube is that you didn’t get Trump to put $500 billion of capital in Black communities. It’s a lie. It’s ONE LINE on the cover sheet of his so-called Platinum Plan. No specifics. NOTHING. Bruh, you got played.”

Donald Trump has a strained relationship with the Black community. In the 2016 presidential election, then-candidate Donald Trump pulled in only 8 percent of the Black vote against the former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton.

“Did Ice Cube ask Trump to apologize for leading a lynch mob against the Central Park Five?” tweeted Keith Boykin, a Black journalist and commentator on CNN. “Did he ask him to apologize for spreading a racist lie about Pres. Obama’s birth certificate?”

Not all of Ice Cube’s fans disagreed though. “I think it was not a bad thing for Cube to meet Trump’s people. I think people should at least hear a person out before passing judgment,” said Eddie Shafidya, a 28-year-old Black man living in Atlanta, Georgia. “I don’t see it any different than if a local leader was meeting up with a politician they didn’t vote for.”

Ice Cube’s association with the Trump campaign bore little to no fruit. He lost the African American vote by 90 percent, according to exit polls. “I love me some Ice Cube, but there’s no f…ing way my black ass is voting for that orange clown,” said Caine. “F… Donald Trump.”