Snoop Dogg thinks it’s time for some fundamental change. In a “Corner Office” interview with The New York Times, the rapper and entrepreneur said that it’s time corporate America stopped treating Black people “like they’re less.”
Asked what he thinks about NBA icons Kevin Durant and Steph Curry making investments in startups, Snoop zeroed in on a key gap that he thinks need to be filled right away. “They’re always the ones who do the hard work, the groundwork, but we never but them in,” Snoop said of Black businesspeople.
“Like, why don’t we have an owner in an NFL? That’s just racist. Period, point blank,” he said of the century-old football league that currently has two minority co-owners — Pakistani American Shahid Kahn of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Asian American Kim Pegula of the Buffalo Bills — but which has never had a team fully owned by a Black businessperson. “We need to own an NFL team. We got one half-owner in the NBA, Michael Jordan. But the whole league is 90 percent Black. So we still the slaves and they still the masters.”
Spokespeople for the NBA and NFL had not yet returned Billboard’s requests for comment.
Snoop — who appears in the upcoming Addams Family movie, has commercial deals with Corona, Beyond Meat and Bic lighters, and a VH1 series with pal Martha Stewart among his many ventures — said that his rule about working with brands is that it has to be “fun. And it’s going to make funds. So long as the world ‘fun’ in involved it’s cool.”
Even in the legal cannabis business — which has a small, but expanding minority-owned footprint — blunt-loving Snoop said he never imagined how big the market would be, but he sees the clear writing on the wall in terms of how it’s being positioned. “I don’t understand how it could go from being the most hated, the most vicious thing that you could do, to now everybody’s capitalizing off of it, and they’re leaning toward a demographic that can prosper off of it, as opposed to the demographic that created the business,” he said.
“We should be able to have some of our people — that look like me — as executives, as CEOs, as platform owners,” he added. “You know, the top of the chain, not just the spokesperson or the brand ambassador. We need to be the brand owners.”
But beyond bud and B-ball, Snoop said he’s trying to close the Black wealth gap through leading by example and striving to be “someone who creates his own everything, owns his own everything, and has a brand strong enough to compete with Levi’s and Miller and Kraft and all of these other brands that have been around for hundreds of years. That’s what I want the Snoop Dogg brand to be.”
