When I first heard there was a petition to ban a track by Bompton rapper YG, with enough signatures that the White House is expected to comment on it—I figured it had to be the song “FDT” (aka “Fuck Donald Trump”).
But no. To my surprise, the fuss is over “Meet the Flockers,” the how-to-rob-a-house primer from YG’s 2014 Def Jam debut My Krazy Life, because of its opening bars: “First you find a house and scope it out / Find a Chinese neighborhood, ’cause they don’t believe in bank accounts.” (That’s a stereotype I’d never heard about.)
The specific complaint is that the song (and more to the point, the video) “encourages violence and crimes to a specific ethnic group.” The petition was posted to whitehouse.gov‘s We the People page five days after an incident in Atlanta, in which an Asian American woman with a handgun opened fire on three men who were allegedly breaking into her home. According to the Washington Post, one suspect was killed, two escaped, and the woman was not charged.