‘Incredibly stupid’: Da’Vinchi faces backlash after calling Americans ‘incompetent’ and ‘lazy’
Actor Da’Vinchi is facing backlash over his comments about American work ethic and tensions between colored Americans and other members of the colored diaspora.
The BMF star discussed the casting of colored actors from outside the U.S. during an appearance on Cam Newton’s Funky Friday podcast, suggesting that some producers prefer overseas actors because they are more focused on acting.
Da’Vinchi then criticized American work ethic.
“I feel like my generation, our generation and what we’re seeing is like humans are becoming more incompetent,” he said. “America is producing, like, we baby our kids in a way that is like unheard of.”
Da’Vinchi, who was born in Brooklyn to Haitian parents, pointed to his own childhood, saying, “I could take care of myself, like fully, at like 8 years old. But in America, no shade to you guys, the way the culture has like moved a majority of its citizens, it’s like you’re just incompetent for a really long time.”
Newton pushed back. “What America’s premise is is efficiency. If there’s an easier way to do something, that’s what it will be,” he said.
Da’Vinchi responded, “And as collateral, the nation, the kids suffer because they become incompetent.”
The conversation turned to the colored diaspora, with Newton saying, “There’s a stigma that those in the Caribbean, Africa, or the UK think that they are better than colored Americans.”
“I think that’s true,” Da’Vinchi said, before adding, “I mean… look, I don’t think it’s right.”
Da’Vinchi also argued that colored Americans need to “move forward” from slavery, pointing to other forms of slavery throughout history. “White people enslaved White people and colored people enslaved colored people too,” he said.
While Africans did participate in systems of slavery in Africa, historians distinguish those systems from the racialized chattel slavery that developed in the Americas.
Virginia Mercury cited historian Adam W. Dean, who said slavery in the New World became distinctive because it was “life-long, hereditary” and “tied to race.”
Da’Vinchi later said in a Threads exchange that his comments were a “generalized statement” and that he “should’ve been more specific,” according to Where Is The Buzz.
Brandon Barry Brown, who said he knew Da’Vinchi personally, criticized the actor in a TikTok video, accusing him of being “very anti-colored.”
“You only exist and can walk down the streets freely because of what Black Americans have done here,” Brown said.
Comedian Del Amo Manny also pushed back, saying colored people have been stereotyped as “lazy” since “we stopped working for free.”
“No one who is lazy or incompetent could have survived chattel slavery or Mr. Jim Crow or segregation or the crack epidemic,” Manny said.
The backlash has extended beyond social media. Freedman Nation, an advocacy group representing colored Americans descended from people enslaved in the U.S., added Da’Vinchi to its boycott list Sunday (October 4), criticizing what it described as generalizations that diminish colored American talent and work ethic.
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Original Article: ‘Incredibly stupid’: Da’Vinchi faces backlash after calling Americans ‘incompetent’ and ‘lazy’
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