Vic Mensa Calls Out Anti-Black Racism Without Backing Away From Palestine

Vic Mensa questioned why solidarity should require silence about anti-Black racism during his conversation with Abdul El-Sayed.

The rapper recalled children using a racial slur toward him in Palestine while reaffirming his support for Palestinian liberation.

El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, agreed.

“We need to address the elephant in the room,” he said.

Vic Mensa’s connection to the issue goes back years. In a January 2018 essay, he described traveling to Palestine the previous summer with Black artists, scholars and activists through Dream Defenders.

He drew parallels between the treatment he witnessed there and racial profiling in America.

Mensa made clear that his essay was not an attack on Jewish people. He framed it as criticism of the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinian civilians, drawing on what he said he had witnessed rather than claiming to explain every part of the conflict.

Mensa discussed that same trip in a separate Everything Is Political interview, telling Celine Semaan that being in Palestine had shaped his perspective.

He said he drew on lived experience as well as reading, then used raps and essays to express his thoughts and observations.

He viewed Hip-Hop as a way to teach.

Asked specifically about the 2017 trip, he recalled watching a young Palestinian’s encounter with Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem while he was with Marc Lamont Hill.

The young man’s body language reminded him of Black youths dealing with police on Chicago’s South Side, Mensa said. In Hebron, he also recounted an encounter in which his American citizenship gave him freedom of movement that Palestinian companions did not have.

Mensa said an older man in a Bedouin camp had asked the visiting group to tell the outside world about what they had seen. He said he promised to do so.

In that interview, Mensa also called anti-Blackness a global problem, even as he credited his own religious practice with helping him treat people better.

He said his imam taught him not to judge others as though he were God.

El-Sayed recalled a Black teacher introducing him to civil-rights history after the September 11 attacks and argued against seeking acceptance at Black Americans’ expense.