Shortly after this happens, there’s a scene in which a $100 bill is needed. This time, a white man on the video crew speaks up, asking if anyone has one. He looks directly at Curry’s manager, Maturah, who’s dark-skinned with locs, and says, “You have one, right?” Maturah doesn’t, but an older white woman does. She retrieves it and they move on, but Maturah asks, “You saw that, right?” When I check in with Maturah after the shoot, he tells me neither he nor Curry were offended. “It was all a joke,” he texts. He and Curry have been navigating the industry for the better part of a decade now, so they’ve likely had worse experiences, but it says a lot that they’re willing to look past prejudices for the sake of maintaining good vibes and sticking to a schedule.

While the extras on set are mostly people of color, the video crew itself is largely white. In both of these situations, the crew members revealed their cultural blind spots. To hop up on my soapbox real quick: This is why diversity is important both behind the scenes and in front of the camera. It’s bound to hurt not only the morale of the artist, but also the quality of the project when the team pulling the strings doesn’t have any idea what the artist is about. Period.

Luckily for all of us, Curry thrives on the uncomfortable. He lives to make people sit in discomfort with him and help them work through it instead of dodging it. On set, he keeps the humor on 10, even during microaggressive moments like the aforementioned. During the several hours I watch him work, he grabs the extras and crew members and gives them shoutouts while also roasting them, going out of his way to maintain positive energy and make his collaborators laugh. To keep it a buck, part of a rapper’s job is to keep his or her listeners distracted as the world burns around us. Many of them, like Curry, grew up in less-than-ideal situations, and they’re committed to creating their way out of poverty, death, and destruction. Curry is incredibly aware of the inequalities that have shaped this country and his city of Carol City/Miami—which in turn shaped him.

“There are a lot of beautiful women everywhere, and there’s a lot of money, you feel me?” he explains. “[Money] that’s not in my pocket from my own city. It creates a thing where people gotta do fraud, scams, juugin’, home invasions, all that type of stuff. Because they wanna live this fast life and get it in quick, conning the next man to get something. That’s what it is in my city. And I’m not saying my city is all the way fucked up, because it’s beautiful at the same time.”