Despite a recently-surfaced recording of Eminem spouting racial slurs, the rapper insists he isn't a racist.

Ray Benzino and Dave Mays, owners of the hip-hop magazine The Source, played the short recording at a press conference yesterday.

According to MTV.com, the first track features a young Slim Shady rapping, "All the girls I like to bone have big butts/ No they don't, 'cause I don't like that ni**er sh*t/ I'm just here to make a bigger hit."

The second track went on for a few minutes and featured the rapper repeatedly saying he did not like black girls and that they were only out to get money. The two amateur-sounding tracks were allegedly recorded in 1993.

In response to the tracks, Eminem said Benzino, Mays and The Source have had a vendetta against him and his record company for a long time, fuelled by accusations that the white rapper gets away with saying things a black rapper never could.

"The tape they played today was something I made out of anger, stupidity and frustration when I was a teenager," said Eminem. "I'd just broken up with my girlfriend, who was African-American, and I reacted like the angry, stupid kid I was.

"I hope people will take it for the foolishness that it was, not for what somebody is trying to make it into today."

Don't make this right now into a double standard," Benzino told the press after airing the recording. "We gotta treat this the same way you treat Mike Tyson, like you treat Kobe Bryant, like you treat R. Kelly, like you treat O.J. Simpson."

Benzino and Mays refused to comment further, but said they planned to release the recording with the February issue of The Source.