Rapper Meek Mill is getting dragged on social media for a recent interaction with some industrious kids. The 33-year-old posted a video of himself talking to some children selling water bottles on the street in Atlanta, Georgia, where he handed them a $20 bill. He told the seven kids to split the money amongst themselves.
Mill shared the clip on his Instagram Story, filmed from his perspective in the driver's seat of his Rolls-Royce. He had the window halfway open, showing the hopeful faces of kids he deemed "Atl RUNTZ." Mill and someone else in the car asked the kids what they were raising money to support, to which the clearest answer seemed to be "my mama." After handing over a $20 bill, one of the children asked Mill for more, saying that they others were not going to split it up fairly. "Don't put your hand on my car," Mill said as he began to drive away. "I just gave y'all money, man!"
Critics in Mill's comment section called the whole ordeal "performative activism." One person wrote: "I don't need to record myself doing a good deed," while another called the amount "disrespectfully low." However, die-hard fans of Mill pointed out that this was not the extent of his activism.
Mill donated a 2018 Rolls-Royce Phantom to the All-In Challenge, a charity which benefits food security efforts in light of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report by The New York Post. While he has apparently replaced the car since then, he is best-known for his work on criminal justice reform.
Mill has a history of run-ins with the law, including a recent sentence of two to four years in prison for probation violation, following drug and weapons charges. After that sentence, fellow rapper Jay-Z produced a docuseries called Free Meek for Amazon Prime Video, which tackled issues of recidivism and systemic racism in the criminal justice world.
Mill and Jay-Z co-founded the REFORM Alliance Foundation — a nonprofit organization that aims "to dramatically reduce the number of people who are unjustly under the control of the criminal justice system – starting with probation and parole." The organization has now grown substantially, and hired CNN political analyst Van Jones as its CEO.
To Mill, this run-in with ambitious Atlanta youths had little to do with those wider efforts. In a tweet about the viral encounter, he wrote: "They appreciated it they just hustling kids..." Still, many fans were not impressed. Here is a look at what they had to say.