You know Daniel Caesar. Even if you haven't heard his solo music, you heard him on Justin Bieber's "Peaches."
OK, so let's go back to 2019 for a moment — specifically, the time when influencer YesJulz received a massive amount of well-deserved backlash for asking Twitter if she could wear a shirt with a racial slur on it. (You can see the original tweet here.)
In response to the outrage, Daniel hopped on IG Live, admitted that he wasn't sober at the time, and defended YesJulz while making comments about Black people that didn't sit right with pretty much anyone. At one point, he basically dared the audience to "cancel" him.
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"Why are we being so mean to white people right now?" he asked. "That’s a serious question. Why is it that we’re allowed to be disrespectful and rude to everybody else and when anybody returns any type of energy to us. That’s not equality. I don’t wanna be treated like I can’t take a joke. ... White people have been mean to us in the past, yeah, but what are you going to do about it?"
In a new interview with Nadeska for Apple Music, Daniel finally addressed his comments in full and apologized for hurting people with his remarks.
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Daniel said that he "completely" understood the backlash he faced for his comments. “And in time, after taking time to get over myself and to really honestly look at myself and everything that was happening, I was wrong," he said.
"I was wrong, and I’m sorry about that."
Daniel also talked about his feelings about being canceled, and how he reflected on the process itself of canceling someone. "For a long time, I was like, ‘You can’t do anything, you can’t say anything without whatever,'" he admitted.
“You can do and say whatever you want, but it’s like, for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction," he said. "And that’s physics, that’s science. That’s one of those things that the knowledge of that can literally put my mind at ease where I’m like, oh, I did deserve."
"What happened, happened because I deserved it, because I knocked the domino over and set a course in motion."
Daniel also admitted that it took him a bit to realize he was in the wrong, because he learned "not to trust what people on the internet have to say and what people that you don’t know have to say."
“Seeing that people that I do know that I care about, them being hurt, then it’s like, ‘Ah, damn, all right.’ I was like, ‘Okay, you know me.’ It’s because it’s seeing that people that know me, because I felt in my — clearly, my ego is going out of control.”
“I felt in that moment that I could say what I had said and the context of who I am would be taken into account," he continued. "But I guess people don’t know who I am."
"I thought at the time that I was saying something, meaning well, but it didn’t, and it hurt people, and I don’t want to hurt anybody. That’s really, that’s not what I do. That’s not what I’m interested in doing.”
