By —

Rap music not to blame for racist frat video, Twitter says

Nation Mar 11, 2015 6:38 PM EDT

During a discussion this morning on the recent video featuring members of a fraternity at Oklahoma University chanting racist slurs, the hosts of “Morning Joe” laid the blame on someone other than the fraternity brothers: the rapper Waka Flocka Flame.

The musician recently canceled a scheduled concert at the OU campus in response to the video, saying he was “disgusted,” and did not want to perform for the students there.

Co-host Joe Scarborough, however, said that lyrics like Waka Flocka Flame’s cause incidents like the one captured on video. “So do they hear this at home?” he asked. “Well, chances are good, no. They heard a lot of this from guys like this who are now acting shocked.”

Co-host Mika Brzezinski felt Waka Flocka Flame’s lyrics were disgusting, saying, “It’s wrong. And he shouldn’t be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself.”

Writer Vann Newkirk shared his reaction to the ‘Morning Joe’ segment on Twitter.

"White people keep saying the n-word because of hip-hop!"

Damn bruh rap must have been LIT in 1823

— Vann R. Newkirk II (@fivefifths) March 11, 2015

Inspired by this tweet, Twitter user Alvian, who asked to be identified by his first name only, expressed his frustration using the hashtag #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery.

Alvian, a 27-year-old linguist from Georgia, told NewsHour that he hoped to highlight what he felt was an absurd assertion: that this was an isolated incident inspired by rap music. “They didn’t just get to OU and become THAT racist, and they certainly didn’t learn it from a Waka Flocka song. This isn’t an anomaly, it’s a tradition, and though I don’t know anything about the origins of the chant, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been around for as long as the organization itself.”

The hashtag, he said, was meant to provide a humorous way of dealing with frustration. “Finding that humor really exposes the absurdity of some of these people’s thought processes, and as we’ve seen time and time again, if there’s a joke there, Black Twitter will find it,” Alvian said. The rest of the Twitter community took the hashtag and ran with it.