Another unruly, uncivilized thug has joined the list of rappers touting weapons on social media and posting threats online. His consistent use of the N-word is cringe-worthy and severely damaging the progress of the Black community. It’s clearly time to call in the mothers, like the “hero mom” of Baltimore, to beat some sense into the young man who had decided to throw his future away for the sake of being a gangster.
Perhaps that’s how the conversation would begin across all media platforms if the subject in question wasn’t actually Chester Hanks, the 24-year-old son of Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson.
Chester, whose stage name is Chet Haze, has blown up the Twitterverse and caused a major disturbance in the land of Instagram with a serious 1,2 punch to the Black community.
The first brow-raising blow came when he dropped the N-word to promote a new rap song he released over the weekend and the follow through uppercut came in the form of Instagram videos attempting to defend his decision to use the racial slur.
“Check out the song me and my n***a @chillthatdude just dropped on my Soundcloud #Juice LINK IN MY BIO #GoListen!!!” he wrote under photo on Instgram.
It didn’t take long for the social media site to erupt with criticism aimed at his use of the word along with the beginning sparks of a conversation about cultural appropriation.
Unfortunately, it also didn’t take long for Hanks’ son to make matters worse with a poorly thought our response.
“If I say the [N-word] I say it amongst people I love and who love me,” he wrote under one of the videos he posted in response to the controversy. “If I say f**k yall hatin ass [N-words] its because that’s really how I felt at the time. And I don’t accept society getting to decide what ANYBODY can or can’t say. That’s something we call FREE SPEECH. Now I understand the older generation who grew up in the Jim Crowe era might have strong feelings against this. And that’s understandable… But what I’m saying is this is 2015…And even tho we are still far from where we need to be and black people are still being literally KILLED by a RACIST and f****d up system…We have also reached a point where the word can no longer have a negative connotation if we so choose.”
The lengthy message continued on but it never got any better.
He insisted that hip hop is a culture that has nothing to do with race as he slammed “built up rules” about the use of the N-word while insisting that he is no “thug.”
As for the content of the first video, he simply reiterated the lengthy caption in a way that fit Instagram’s 16 second limit on videos before following up with a poor attempt clarify his statement.
“Under no circumstances would I [go] up to someone that I didn’t know and just be like, ‘Hey, what’s up my [N-word],’ “ He added. “It’s an unspoken thing between people who are friends, who understand each other.”
In addition to slinging around the racial slur all over social media, the young aspiring rapper has also posted images of himself touting guns and is remembered for threatening controversial radio host Howard Stern.
It’s the type of social media platform that has launched investigations into the lives of some Black hip hop stars and is far worse than the types of posts the media highlighted following the deaths of unarmed Black teens like Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin.
But you won’t find any extensive think pieces explaining why Hanks is “no angel” who needs discipline in the form of bullets or a push for Rita Wilson to drag her son off social media beat him into apologizing for his actions.
