Trina has addressed her recent comments in which she compared protestors to "animals...acting like they have escaped from a zoo." Earlier this week, Trina received backlash for denouncing looting and damaging property during protests against police brutality and racial injustice in the wake of George Floyd's murder. The rapper has since attempted to clarify what she meant, explaining that she is not against peaceful protests, but she does not condone destroying your own community in the name of justice.
"They’re attacking me and trying to bully me because I have a voice and I speak and I said how I felt," Trina said on Wednesday's episode of The Trick N' Trina Morning Show. "On Monday when I came in…I was frustrated, I was angry, I was emotional, I was going through many emotions."
"Here’s the thing," she began. "I do not have a problem with the protests. I do not have a problem with people walking and peacefully protesting and celebrating and feeling frustrated and angered and all this about George Floyd because I, myself, went to a protest. It was peaceful." However, as she expressed in her initial rant when the "animal" comment was spewed, she does have a problem with people "breaking and kicking in windows and burning things up in our community."
"Nobody wants to see our communities being burnt down or torn down or ambushed, because this is still our community, our property, our place that we gotta go," she stresses. "I’m not talking about the designer stores. I don’t care about none of that. They don’t give me nothing free. I’m talking about our community. Don’t tear it up, don’t self-destruct it because that has nothing to do with George Floyd. That is not getting a message across and that is not getting to the solution. That is not helping the situation. His own family spoke up and said that. it’s distracting people from talking about what’s happened to him. It’s distracting people from getting answers."
However, she was much more apologetic about her "animal" comments on Thursday's episode of T&T. “I just wanna say that I apologize sincerely, to everybody I offended by what I said,” she stated. "I can see where that was insensitive. I take full responsibility because it was a mistake."
"Me, in my Trina’s world, I’m automatically speaking for Black people," she explained. "I am the Black people. I am Black people. That’s who I’m speaking for, and I’m not going to say Black people are animals. But I didn’t say that ‘Hey, my Black people or all of my people.’ I’m not talking to you. Not the protestors that are trying to make a change. I’m not calling nobody’s colour or anything…I didn’t say Black people, my people. And I would never say that or call Black people animals. Or any name. I am a Black person. I must be an animal. I must be the same person. I mean, that’s not who I am.”