What We’re Talking About…
Kanye is Triggering Black People for Attention & Profit. It’s Time to Let Him Go.
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Kanye West is acting like a white supremacist. Full stop.
It sounds harsh, but what are we left to believe? In his latest attention grabbing antics, Kanye West presented during his surprise Paris Fashion Week presentation, Kanye wore a shirt with the phrase “White Lives Matter” emblazoned on his back. Adding insult to injury, Kanye posed with far right firebrand, Candace Owens who was also wearing the same shirt.
He later posted to his Instagram Story that “EVERYONE KNOWS THAT BLACK LIVES MATTER WAS A SCAM. NOW ITS OVER. YOU’RE WELCOME.”
He later said about the decision on the Tucker Carlson show, a show that itself has been called “the most racist show in the history of cable news”, that “The answer to why I wrote ‘White Lives Matter’ on a shirt is because they do.”
This statement is gaslighting at its finest.
It goes without saying that the lives of everyone SHOULD matter. However, the call of the movement Black Lives Matter was to highlight the ways that Black people for too long have endured treatment that says our lives don’t matter. The movement Black Lives Matter is not saying that our lives matter more, it’s a rallying cry that says our lives should matter also.
The movement Black Lives Matter is an attempt to have a dialogue with a nation that at its roots does not value the lives of Black people. Black Lives Matter does this by showing all of the areas that still uphold the racial caste system, from the justice system to medicine to housing to employment to education, etc. When folks say “All Lives Matter” or worse “White Lives Matter” in reaction to Black Lives Matter, it de-centers that conversation and refocuses the attention from where its needed to where its always been, on White People.
What Kanye did in the creation and promotion of this shirt is just another way he continues to ignore the centuries of human trafficking, normalized sexual assault, regular dehumanization, and oppression…
