Snoop Dogg has called out the NBA and NFL for a lack of diversity in team ownership roles.
Despite the high proportion of Black players in the NBA and NFL leagues, the rapper questioned why this doesn't equate to Black people in high profile roles as team owners.
He told The New York Times: "I mean, you would think that those businesspeople up top would say: ‘You know what? It’s time to change the world. We’ve got to stop treating Black people like they’re less. They’re always the ones who do the hard work, the groundwork, but we never cut them in.'"
On the NFL's lack of Black team owners, Snoop Dogg - real name Calvin Cordozar Broadus Jr - continued: "That’s just racist. Period, point-blank."
He went on: "We need to own an NFL team. We got one half-owner in the NBA, Michael Jordan. But the whole league is 90% Black. So we still the slaves and they still the masters."
He also went on to compare it to the music industry and musician's work in owning their own masters.
"That’s why in the music game, we took the initiative to say, f*** that," he added. "We're the masters, and we own our masters. We’re going to negotiate with you the way we think it should be. We changed that industry years ago, with our mentality of having our own labels."
Michael Jordan is the only Black majority owner of a team - Charlotte Hornets - however, several other ownership organizations have high-profile Black members like Grant Hill and Shaquille O'Neal, per The Undefeated.
Such a lack of representation, the rapper said, is why Black people in the music industry are pushing back.
However, Snoop isn't too impressed with the streaming business, either.
"I just don’t understand how you only get this little bit amount of money per stream," he said. "I just don’t understand the dynamics of those numbers, and how they can create these systems without Black people up top, while Black people are the ones generating the most money from these systems through the music."
He added: "So I’m just trying to figure out when they’re going to cut us in in the beginning, as opposed to always letting us be the ones who get it to a point where these platforms can sell for billions of dollars, and then the Black people that made it famous get nothing."
Noting that TikTok faces a similar problem, he went on: "All of the young Black content creators on TikTok have boycotted because they see that when they do the dances they don’t get the attention or the money.
"But as soon as the White dancers do it, it’s the biggest [expletive] in the world, and they on Jimmy Fallon. That’s not fair. It’s not cool to just keep stealing our culture right in front of us and not include us in the finances of it all."
