And if he’s not allowed to talk about U.S. slavery, do they need to retract Silver & Gold? Are they still allowed to perform songs like Pride and MLK that are about the historical results of slavery?
I would say he can talk about US slavery but needs to be careful not to try to speak like it's his story. Jay-Z isn't trying to talk about the Troubles like he knows what it's like for the people who lived it. Pride and MLK are fine, imho, because they honor a specific man, but the songs don't try to speak for a people about a subject that Bono doesn't have the nuance on.
Bono once famously complained on-stage about "Irish-Americans, who haven't been back to their country in 20 or 30 years, come up to ME and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home." He was 100% correct. Irish-Americans can be interested, they can have an opinion, but they have to realize, they can't speak for the Irish anymore. And people who aren't even Irish-American, who were actually born in America, perhaps to Americans, perhaps who don't have much or any Irish ancestry, can speak even less because they don't know. We think we might know but we don't. So Bono needs to be as careful as he rightly thinks non-Irish need to be careful.
Silver and Gold was different from Pride and MLK. Musically, I love that song - the R&H version was a family favorite when I was growing up. Very powerful, makes me really feel something. But Bono uses the first person in the lyrics, and that would be like me (an American) writing my own version of Raised by Wolves in the first person, imagining what it was like. (I realize Bono used the first person to describe his friend's experience and not his own, but they fully share that culture and he could capture the nuance of his friend's experience very accurately). In Silver and Gold there are lyrics that try to describe the racial oppression of Apartheid (which he has never remotely experienced), and with a dramatic license, without that shared culture.
In Pride and MLK, he doesn't try to speak for MLK or tell King's story in Bono's words with a dramatic license. He simply honors him, and that is a good thing.