Killer Mike Explains "Re-entrification"| Joe Rogan

Yeah, well everybody feels like it's somebody else's job. Everybody feels like, Work like that. Yeah, and everybody feels like, well you just gotta get out of that neighborhood. Nah, that doesn't work. No, no one else's work. Roxanne Chante talked about re-entrification. She said, you know, she doesn't wanna hear people keep complaining about gentrification. When the kids that are leaving these neighborhoods, whether they sing, dance, rap or not, or just go get good jobs and go be just a human being, you should be re-entering your neighborhoods. You should be buying houses or pieces of land there. One of the most impressive things, one of my favorite players was John Stockton. And I don't know if it's true or not, but I read a story that he actually bought a house right on the street he grew up in. So in the off season, he'd go back, essentially home with his kids. So they'd had some type of normalization to their life. We should be doing that. You know, T.I. and I have bought properties together in the same neighborhoods we grew up in. We're developing things like restaurants and stuff. I'd like to see more athletes and rappers become the merchant and business class that way. And I'd like to see people who grew up in neighborhoods move back to those neighborhoods they grew up in, like the typical iconic American dream. You can build another 8,000 square feet in the back of your A-frame house if you want to, but you shouldn't be going to 50, 60 minutes outside the city and then complaining about the blight of the city because you took yourself away. You took the talent and the resources away. Do you think that everyone should feel that way though? Or is it, I mean, do you feel like you have to be committed to the city that you grew up in or couldn't you want to just get the fuck out of there and go somewhere different? There's nothing wrong with getting the fuck out, but you gotta- You just think you should go back and support it. Yeah, it's like I tell kids, you know, in college when they say, Mike, you know, what can we do? You know, kids in college kids, when you go speak at college, they say, well, what could we do? Kids want to respect the world. Very easy. Find a kid in high school, tutor that kid, make sure they replace you at this university or another. That's it. You're just replanting to see. If you grow food, you know, you don't grow the same land year after year after year. Some, you have to give that land a break, retil it, you know what I'm saying? It's kind of like the neighborhood. So you don't have to stay in the same neighborhood your whole life. You don't have to feel like I never went anything or escaped anywhere, but you do have to, don't sell your mother's house. Hmm. You know, rent it to your cousin, you know? Let your younger sister in, but don't sell your mother. That piece of land was worked for. The blood, the toil, the soil, it means something and it should. And for working class people especially, it keeps your neighborhood and communities more like the ones that made you be a good human being. So I think that there's something, most people don't leave the town they grow up in. They move to the other side or they move to the suburbs. Most people marry somebody they knew, you know what I'm saying? My thing is make the best of it. Don't let it keep becoming the worst. A man named Mr. John, my wife and I own barber shops for people who don't know. We own these things called the shade washing room shops. We have one in State Farm Arena where the Atlanta Hawks play. We have our flagship store on Edgewood Avenue. Edgewood Avenue was once, and Auburn Avenue were once the centers of black Atlanta in terms of commerce and retail and money. Atlanta Life Insurance Company were there. You guys Google some of this stuff. This is big time shit. You know, this isn't the old narrative of we've never had nothing. Cause that's not the truth. Atlanta was a very rich city for African Americans. Still is. On this street, used to be owned by African Americans, the storefronts in there. Their children, after these people died off, sold the buildings off and sold them for cheap. And I know this because a man named Mr. John who runs a grocery store there stopped me one day. He said, you know, Michael, after we have gone in this neighborhood, it's been gentrified and everything's different. They're gonna come along and say that white people stole this from us. And he said, that's not true. He say the children of the people that were here left and they never came back cause they didn't think what their parents built was good enough. Oh man, and it killed me. Because that is not just black people. That's Americans period. We have gotten to a point where we are unappreciative. We are entitled and we don't think what happened before us was good enough. So we don't treasure it. We don't honor it. We don't reinvest in it. That could be a farm in Milledgeville. That could be a house in Adamsville. But we have to do a better job of appreciating ourselves, appreciating our community and then appreciating our greater community. And you have to reenter. You have to reentrify that. You have to be a part of whatever gentrification happens to make sure that your stake is still there and that what you care about from a morals and civil perspective is represented there. My uncle, my uncle John Blackmon, who was a huge influence on me, died and had a five car garage where he did transmissions and stuff. And I begged my aunt to sell it. Please, I don't want you, I know they're gonna come. The belt line's coming out of school, but please sell it to me. I didn't want my uncle's building for to go to strangers and become an apartment complex or something. And I walked in your building, I seen your building, and I said, wow, I know what I'm gonna do with it now. I've had it for like three years now. I just had it, but I never knew what I wanted to do, but you were like, yo, you need somewhere to go every day. Your building is impressive. I'm like, yo, I'm just gonna just make my uncle's building my offices, right? And I figure out a way to make a lot of money off of it. I mean, I've already made a lot of money, which is what, and leaving me to buy it. But it's important to me that as this neighborhood turns into hipster land, because it's definitely gonna be, it's just gonna be black hips. It's gonna be like chocolate hipster land. I just wanted to make sure that there's still some chocolate working class in there. And sometimes they're gonna go buy coffee, and there's gonna be a loud ass muscle car and lots of marijuana smoke blowing out of it so they'll know that my uncle's nephew's still in town.