morningjoe
Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" unleashed the Twitter hashtag #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery after blaming rap lyrics for the racist frat chant sung by University of Oklahoma's Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat. Reuters

Most people shook their heads in disgust at the viral video of University of Oklahoma Sigma Alpha Epsilon frat brothers singing a racist song about excluding blacks. But Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and their guest Bill Kristol saw it as an opportunity to blame rappers and their use of the N-word in their lyrics for encouraging impressionable white college students to use the same language, Gawker reports. In response, the hashtag #RapAlbumsThatCausedSlavery fought back with instantaneous satire that exposed the absurdity of the argument.

It all started on Wednesday’s episode of “Morning Joe,” when host Brzezinski responded to the report that rapper Waka Flocka Flame publicly stated that because of the viral video, which was secretly recorded, he wouldn’t perform at the University of Oklahoma in protest.

"If you look at every single song, I guess you call these, that he’s written,” Brzezinski said, “it's a bunch of garbage. It's full of N-words. It's full of F-words. It's wrong. And he [Waka Flocka Flame] shouldn't be disgusted with them, he should be disgusted with himself." Conservative commentator Bill Kristol agreed, adding, "Popular culture becomes a cesspool, a lot corporations profit off of it, and then people are surprised that some drunk 19-year-old kids repeat what they've been hearing." By adding that the "kids" were drunk, Kristol echoed chant leader Parker Rice's "racist while drunk" defense.

What neither Brzezinski nor Scarborough nor Kristol addressed was that the racist chant was about barring black people from the fraternity, and included the line: “You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me,” referring to lynching. "There is a distinction between white kids on a bus talking about hanging someone and Waka Flocka singing a song," co-host Willie Geist said.

But perhaps the argument was better made in satire, with the comparison that it made as much sense to blame rap for creating slavery:

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