The cover art for Pusha-T’s song “The Story of Adidon” is jarring: a photo of a young Aubrey Graham, better known as Drake, in blackface with wide grin.

The image, which accompanied the latest musical volley in an ongoing back-and-forth between the rappers, was an effective bit of opposition research, leaving fans scrambling to debate its legitimacy and determine its provenance.

Following 24 hours of memes and speculation, Drake — facing a lacerating track that questioned his authenticity, attacked his friends and family and insisted that he was hiding a secret child — opted to respond, for now, only to the photograph. In a rare public statement, delivered on Instagram, the rapper, who is biracial, said that his poses in blackface were a commentary on race from his days as a young actor.

“I know everyone is enjoying the circus but I want to clarify this image in question,” Drake wrote on his iPhone’s Notes app on Wednesday night. “This picture is from 2007, a time in my life where I was an actor and I was working on a project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and type cast.” (Onscreen, Drake is best known for his role on the Canadian teen soap “Degrassi.”)

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He added, “The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment,” and said that he and a friend were “attempting to use our voice to bring awareness to the issue we dealt with all the time as black actors at auditions.” (An accompanying short film featuring Drake from that period was titled “Us & Them.”)

One of the blackface photos, which was taken from the website of the photographer David Leyes, was surfaced by Pusha-T following Drake’s own strikes in “Duppy Freestyle,” a song released on Friday in response to untoward lyrics on Pusha-T’s new album. Old photos have a historical precedent in hip-hop feuds, from Eazy-E using Dr. Dre’s World Class Wreckin’ Cru days against him on album art to Jay-Z’s SummerJam reveal of Prodigy in a childhood dance class.

Mr. Leyes, who did not respond to a request for comment, wrote on Instagram that the image was Drake’s idea and that he was “proud to be part of a strong statement made by a black man” about the culture he is living in.

Drake was also backed up by the Toronto fashion brand Too Black Guys. While some theorized that the blackface was part of an ad campaign for the brand’s satirical Jim Crow Couture/House of Crow collection, which Drake is wearing in the photos, Adrian Aitcheson, the founder of Too Black Guys, said in a statement: “Although this was not an image from any of our photoshoots, we feel that Drake, who is a longtime friend of the brand, was brilliantly illustrating the hypocrisy of the Jim Crow Era.”

“The subtleties of Drake, a young black man, mimicking how white men used to mimic and dehumanize black people may be lost in a rap battle but we should not be distracted from the issues that are still affecting our communities,” he wrote.

Drake’s fifth album, “Scorpion,” is due out in June.