D.C. rapper Wale teamed up with Pyer Moss designer and creative director Kerby Jean-Raymond for a thought-provoking video for “Sue Me,” off of the former’s Wow… That’s Crazy album.
The seven-minute short film marks the directorial debut for Kerby Jean-Raymond, which imagines an alternate reality where the Black and White experiences are reversed. Filmed in different sections of Brooklyn, New York, “Sue Me” stars Oscar nominee Lucas Hedges (Waves, Honey Boy) as a struggling White teen, who sees life on the other side for the first time.
The images shown throughout the video speak to a collective thought had by other creatives such as Desmond Nakano and James Toback. Instead of seeing “Quaker Oats,” there is “Melanin Oats,” and in another scene, there is a billboard that advertises a dating website called “White People Meet.” Black people throughout the short appear to be the majority class in the country, extolling success, pride, and privilege.
Elsewhere, Hedges visits “Morebucks Coffee” before being forcibly removed à la a 2018 incident involving Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson. Wale films the reversed racial profiling on his phone. “What if you could walk through a day in the life of an average African American young man? What would you see? What would you hear? What would you face?” asks the multi-platinum rapper via press release. “We wanted to redefine the whole narrative and allow everybody to step into these shoes. I’ve never been more proud of a video than what we did here. Kerby really brought this vision to life.”
“Sue Me,” also features singer Kelly Price and is the opening track off Wale’s sixth studio album Wow… That’s Crazy, which was released last October.
Watch the video below.