Trump Pardons Kodak And Tunechi And Suddenly Everyone Cares

On Jan. 20, former President Donald Trump granted clemency to 143 people, including prominent rappers Kodak Black and Lil Wayne. Both had been charged with federal weapons offenses and sentenced to four and ten years respectively. The reasons for their sudden pardoning remain under question. Soon after Trump’s list went public, social media was up in arms, split in a debate over whether the pardons were justified or not. Although the decision to pardon the rappers may seem odd, the resulting controversy quickly became part of a much more serious cultural debate.

It was first revealed that former President Trump was planning to pardon the celebrities almost two weeks before he actually did. It didn’t reach mainstream media at first, seeing as people were too busy speculating about the possibility of Trump pardoning himself. Once the word about Wayne and Kodak got through the fray, the public quickly voiced their mixed reactions.

Some thought it was about time, deeming Kodak’s sentencing too harsh for a paper crime. Others disagreed, arguing that the rapper’s open charges — including rape allegations from 2016 — were reason enough to get him locked up for life.

Fellow rappers were quick to put their two cents in after they caught wind of a pardon on the horizon. Lil Yachty, for example, got the hashtag #freekodak trending. Kodak himself jumped on the bandwagon, tweeting out that he would donate $1 million to charity if the president freed him.

Looking beyond the public debate, one realizes that the reasons behind the rappers’ pardons, however contested they may be, are very dubious.

It is no secret that Lil Wayne is a Trump supporter. The rapper has been very transparent with his endorsement of the administration, often tweeting about the former president’s reform efforts during his election campaigns in 2020. What is not well-known is that, according to the rapper’s lawyer Bradford Cohen, Wayne’s pardon is claimed to be all thanks to "President Trump and his administration” who he claimed “have been tireless advocates on behalf of the African-American community.” When suspicions arose about Wayne having supported Trump precisely because of the power of his presidential pardon, Cohen denied them.

Clearly, something more was going on behind the Twitter screens and the litigious jargon.

In an unsurprising sequence of events, Cohen also spoke on behalf of Kodak Black, saying Kodak “has always given charity his whole career and will continue to do charity, not in exchange for anything,” closely aligning with the White House’s statement on his pardon being due to his philanthropic work on a "variety of charitable efforts, such as providing educational resources to students and families of fallen law enforcement officers and the underprivileged."

Given such questionable reasoning for the rappers’ pardons, people dismissed them, writing them off as a result of the rappers’ endorsement of Trump. With personal political affiliations likely being a factor, the entitlement we feel to passionately contest such issues cannot be overlooked.

The problem is that no one really cares about the systemic oppression at the heart of this issue when there are more trendy issues to debate about. Why talk about institutionalized racism when the Trump pardon list is trending? Why ask how long Wayne was sentenced to prison for when you can write him off as a Trump supporter? Why talk about how one in four Black men end up in the criminal justice system when you can argue about whether four to ten years is a long enough prison sentence?

It is incredibly concerning that we as a society have grown so apathetic to mass incarceration that only top-tier artists can spur a discussion about the imprisonment of Black men. The very hypocrisy of us going out of our way to pick and choose to pardon the victims we deem fit — while simultaneously refusing to condemn the institutions that benefit from their imprisonment in the first place — is disappointing.

Only in a country like America can the people who tweet #freekodak be the very same people who post under #MakeAmericaGreatAgain.

—Staff writer Alisa S. Regassa can be reached at alisa.regassa@thecrimson.com.