No, Big Boi, Maple Syrup Cannot Cure Cancer—and Yes, You Sound Like a Sexist

Atlien rapper Big Boi, one-half of seminal rap duo Outkast, took a bit of dragging on Twitter this weekend after he posted a meme on “baby mamas” that smacked of sexist gibberish.

And then he retweeted a post that said, “Maple syrup can kill cancer.”

But let’s start with the real dumbness first. The first tweet, which went up Sunday at around 1 p.m., could have been the result of hours of drinking Everclear punch and eating grilled meat.

It showed a photo of Thelma from Good Times with her mother, Florida, talking over a pot of … grits (?) juxtaposed with a black woman in a thong over a stool of some sort and the words, “Mothers in the 70’s [vs.] Mothers Now … and we act like we don’t know what’s wrong with these kids.”

Oh, ye of Hotepian drivel. In this day and age, enlightened folk don’t subscribe to that same ole sexist trope of blaming black mothers for the ills of the black community. And then there’s the body-shaming on top of that. (Do you really have to be a 50-year-old mother with a long shirt and Afro to be good?) Yeah, that set a few people off.

There was this:

And this:

This:

Then there was this:

Then there was Daddy Fat Sacks’ retweeted post from @RawDawgBuffalo that said, “Study Suggests That Maple Syrup Can Kill Cancer.”

Actually, on the face of it, this, too, sounds ridiculous and slightly ignorant, but if one clicks on the link, there does seem to be a real cancer research study (“Inhibitory effect of maple syrup on the cell growth and invasion of human colorectal cancer cells” published in Oncology Reports by the National Institutes of Health) that gives this credence.

Twitter count being Twitter count, he went with what was there. So maybe not so ignant here.

But no one wants to hear that after you went in on black mothers.

Big Boi is one of the nicest who ever did it on a mic, and that’s for sure. But in other news, Boi, bye.