Jason Whitlock: “Ja Morant has seemingly gone off the reservation and gone crazy, and seems to be caught up in this thug mentality or wanting to a be gangster. It seems crazy. I don’t know how you can be in the news all last week and then ‘HEY, I’M GONNA GO TO INSTAGRAM AND POST A VIDEO OF MYSELF WITH A GUN!’, other than to say the ‘culture’ has a hold of him. The culture baits young men to buy into the thug mentality, and that’s how you get street cred. If it’s not a humiliation ritual is he just trying to get Allen Iverson street cred? Will this ‘street cred’ help his Nike sales? Will this turn him into a bigger star?... It seems to be some sort of clout chasing and I’m wondering if it’s not going to be effective. It’s fine and necessary to show grace towards Ja Morant because clearly he is confused, and clearly he needs some help, but if that grace doesn’t come along with some rejection of the ‘culture’ that is baiting him, then it falls flat to me and it seems insincere. The entire sports world is intoxicated with gangster rap and hip-hop culture, and celebrate it. I look at Ja Morant, and I don’t think his uncles, his daddy, momma, or anybody is baiting him to go that direction, I think the ‘culture’ is, and we don’t wanna let go of that culture. All of American culture, but particularly it seems like athletes in the NBA and NFL have pretty much said, ‘weed is perfectly fine and acceptable, and anybody who has a problem with weed needs to go away.’ I see what Ja Morant is doing and I just see somebody who is just high all the time. I go back into my past and the dumb things I was involved with— they tended to always be with a bottle or with some weed at the root of it. No one takes this seriously. We think that everybody smoking weed in the NBA or the NFL is doing so for ‘medical reasons’, and ‘this is so much better than anything else’, and I think it’s how you create idiots. There is a problem with this pro-weed, and pro-drug culture we have that is baiting these young men into silliness and foolishness.” (Full Segment Above)
Watch Jason Whitlock of ‘Fearless’ discuss Ja Morant’s bizarre fall from grace this month, as the Memphis Grizzlies superstar followed up a week of mischievous assault allegations against him, with an Instagram Live video of Morant holding a pistol that mercifully culminated with him receiving an indefinite suspension from the team.
Check out the segment above as Whitlock and former NBA player Royce White open up about why they think young athletes in professional sports are being caught up in a ‘gangster rap mentality’ that sees many players trying to live vicariously through hip-hop artists in an attempt to gain 'street cred.'
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