Dr. Umar Johnson, the self-proclaimed “Prince of Pan-Africanism,” might come off more like a court jester most of the time, but he stays consistent on one thing. That man is vehemently anti-swirl. (Well, there was that one time he got caught ki-ki-ing with a Karen at the mall, but he was probably just getting his phone fixed, as he said.)
Recently, Johnson made an appearance on Joe Budden’s podcast and got into a heated exchange with co-host Antwan “Ish” Marby over the fact that Marby has a white girlfriend and, apparently, engages in the jungle fever-influenced activity Umar referred to as “bunny hopping.”
“The reason you have no business being with a Caucasian woman is although she nor her family may have participated in our oppression directly, she benefits from it,” Umar said to Ish.
Earlier in the episode, Ish mentioned that his girlfriend is actually Portuguese, but that didn’t help his argument much as Johnson pointed out that it was the Portuguese who built the first slave dungeons in Africa.
“I know she got racism in her veins because of the Portuguese role in the slave trade,” Johnson said of Ish’s girlfriend.
Predictably, the controversy from Budden’s podcast spilled over into social media. On X, opinions were split between folks who thought Johnson was being loud, wrong and characteristically hotepish and folks from the team, “If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home.”
Side note: It was mentioned during the episode that Africans also sold other Africans into slavery, which makes this as good a time as any to mention that it happened while the continent was being colonized and Western nations drove up the demand for free slave labor to a point where they created a massive international and intergenerational system of slavery that pre-colonial African leaders could not possibly have conceived of. Just saying the historical context there is important.
So, what do y’all think about what Dr. Umar had to say about “bunny hopping?” Was he trippin’, or was this one of those rare moments where he was completely right about a thing? Let us know what you think in the comments.
