The King
In
OZONE’s February 2007 issue, Polow da Don premiered his title of “King of the White Girls,” adding, “I’ve always had one foot in Buckhead and one foot on Bankhead. My parents made me go to private school, and I think that changed my life.” Several months later, in the midst of the super-producer/rapper’s blossoming fame, the Zone 4 CEO made a similar statement in an interview with Allhiphop.com that many felt was degrading to black women. Here, Polow clarifies his opinion and defends his title: First of all, I don’t have a problem with black women at all. I just made a comparison between women of two different ethnic backgrounds. It was an opinionated/factual statement. My comments were very educated. I’ve dated all types of women; Indian women, Pakistani women, Canadian women, women from the UK. I’ve dated women from all over the world. But about my “King of the White Girls” comment, what I said is real, and if anybody has a problem with what I’m saying, they must not be educated. They probably haven’t dated outside their race. They probably haven’t dated different cultures other than their own. They probably haven’t been around the wide spectrum of people I’ve been around, so they can’t make those comparisons, and that’s why they can’t see my point. A lot of people didn’t read my whole interview - if you wanna hide something from black people, just put it in a book. White women love me, man. I don’t know what it is. That’s how I got the title “King of the White Girls.” I used to go out with a whole group of white dudes. We would go out and kick it at all-white clubs, and I’d be the one who would get all the girls. I’d be with a whole group of white boys, and these white girls would just come over choosin’. A white man gave me the nickname “King of the White Girls” and it was in fun, but it had some truth to it. One white boy told me, “I ain’t never seen a m’fucka get more white girls than you except for Fred Durst” — and that’s a huge comment, because he made that statement when Fred Durst was the king. So I didn’t make that name up, it was given to me, and the retarded thing about it is that black women have more of a problem with the nickname than white women. That’s retarded! How is a black woman gon’ have a problem with a black man being titled “King of the White Girls”? Would a white woman be mad if a white man called himself “King of the Black Girls?” Probably not, but black women would be mad, though. I should have white women and Klansman at my door cussing me out, not my own people. That just shows you backwards we are. We’re fucking backwards, and that’s why we are the joke of the world. Black people are the joke of the 34 // OZONE MAG
Girls of the White
explains
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world, and once we realize that, we might be able to change it. As long as we keep dying over rims and a bunch of dumb other shit, and denying that we’re the joke of the world, we’re gon’ keep being the poorest, most AIDS infected, and least fortunate people in the world. We’re gon’ always be niggas until we switch our frame of mind. Black women don’t understand black men, and we don’t understand them. Black women have been taught to be independent. Their grandmothers were probably single parents who raised their mothers, and then their mothers probably ended up being single as well. It’s an ongoing cycle from generation to generation. Black women are trying to raise their daughters as strong women, so they repeatedly tell them, “You don’t need a man.” And if you keep hearing that, eventually you tell yourself that you don’t need a man, and that’s how you live your life. So when a man finally comes into the picture, you’re battling over control. The same thing goes for black men; they’re raised in a lot of single parent homes, too. They don’t have the proper guidance to be a man. So now you’ve got women who are taught not to really be women, and you’ve got men who come from single mothers that can’t properly teach them how to be men. When you put these men and these women together, nine times out of ten the relationship is either gonna fail or end in divorce, because neither one of them knows how to play the role. A lot of people disagreed with what I said, and lot of black women emailed me directl, or Myspaced me about the issue and they were furious. They were calling me a house nigga, asking, “How could you down your black women?”, “Isn’t your mother black?”, all kinds of shit like that, but the next thing you know, I was fucking ‘em — less than a month later. Really. Because when they opened up and listened to what I had to say, they thought I was a genius. People were upset because of all the bad things white people have done to black people in past, and my response was simple as this: Since we know their game and what happened to us during slavery, now it’s time for us to stop blaming them. Now we know. We know it’s a setup. That’s why I attacked us instead of attacking them. I’m saying we’re full of shit. If Rich Boy doesn’t sell a million records, I ask what did [my label] Zone 4 do wrong before I ask what [our distributor/parent label] Interscope did wrong. I look at Rich Boy, like, “Did you do everything you could do?” We gotta start taking the blame for our own actions because that’s the only way you can progress. // As told to Eric Perrin // Photo by Julia Beverly