Last week Donald Trump said that he would send “Feds” to Chicago if the violence in the city did not stop. Chicago rappers Common and Twista have both come forward to express their opinions on whether they believe that is a good idea.
On Wednesday, Trump tweeted: “If Chicago doesn’t fix the horrible “carnage” going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24% from 2016), I will send in the Feds!”
According to Common, sending the feds into Chicago isn’t what’s needed and will only end badly. “To help Chicago, we’ve gotta take care of our own,” said Common. “Within the community we’ve got to do things. There’s a lot of people out there already organizing their own thing. We need our State and Local people to do things. We don’t need that type of mentality.”
Twista offered his views on the president intervening, saying that not all rich white people are bad. “We think that all white people are bad or all rich white people oppress us. They don’t. Everyone has different views. I think he [Trump] stands for the view that in some ways we may be fearful that he may want to hurt us but in some ways they can possibly help us.”
However, when it comes to the needs of his hometown, Twista’s views are similar to Common’s. “We need after school programs and money put back into the community so that we can help ourselves,” said Twista. “Not like the National Guard coming in. You see what happened every time you have a Martial Law type of thing and you bring that type of mentality to the neighborhoods, or you bring a federal type of law to override the law of the city, it’s a bad experience. No one would agree that’s a good idea. I think it’s a problem we can more so fix amongst ourselves.”
