Will.i.Am appeared on Wyclef Jean’s Run That Back podcast and admitted that it “hurts” that Black Eyed Peas isn’t considered a black group because its early success is credited to Hip Hop.
But Kim Hill, who was replaced with Fergie after the group drifted from their roots and aimed for a more pop sound and aesthetic.
“You’re not in those Black roots anymore. So, I don’t understand how you’re not even going to talk about the Black girl that you had in your group and you’re going to skip to 2004 and you say, ‘I don’t understand how the Black community isn’t embracing us,’” Hill’s 10-year-old son, Cassius said in a video alongside his mom.
The 48-year-old added, “For you to make that statement as if the onus is on the Black community to celebrate you and the band when you didn’t celebrate us. It’s almost like there’s this cultural smudging.”
Last year Kim Hill was featured in a 2019 NYT Op-Doc titled, Almost Famous, and it garnered the attention of Black Twitter who was vocal about the group’s lack of support for her. “It almost hurts for it to slip off your tongue that a Black woman had a part in something really magnificent, and I don’t understand it. I was really confused,” Hill said.
“I’ve heard in certain spaces that when you’ve had the opportunity to say my name you don’t but to actually see it. To actually start 2021 off and actually see that you just would not talk about the evolution of The Black Eyed Peas at a time when Wyclef referenced it. And I was there!”
