Of the torrent of comments Kanye “Ye” West received in the days after he and Candace Owens sported “White Lives Matter” shirts to his Paris fashion show, the one that gave him the warmest chuckle came from his father, a former Black Panther. “Just a black man stating the obvious,” he told Tucker Carlson, quoting his dad.
Most of us got it.
“Black Lives Matter” has been used to indoctrinate children, scatter anti-racist eggshells around every workplace, and threaten people’s jobs, livelihoods, and their lives. Under the banner of Black Lives Matter, “protesters” have wrecked restaurants, businesses, government buildings, public monuments, and homes. It’s given race hustlers a license to ruin sports, ruin entertainment, ruin business, ruin commercials, ruin the military, ruin law enforcement, and ruin race relations. Black Lives Matter has been emblazoned on T-Shirts and all sorts of paraphernalia. It’s been painted on streets, painted on pro football fields and basketball courts. It’s been used to rewrite history, topple statues, rename schools and pro sports teams; and its flag has been flown at stores, in classrooms, over government buildings, even over embassies around the globe.
Wearing a shirt that reads “White Lives Matter” made the obvious statement that it’s all been a bit much. It was long overdue, but not nearly enough to shift things back into balance.
Yet, after all we now know about the corruption of the Black Lives Matter organization, and the movement’s exaggerated grievances (even Sharon Osborne asked for her $900,000 back), the celebrity class inside the squeaky cancel culture machinery called what West did “offensive,” “dangerous,” “pure violence,” and “indefensible behavior.”
Some of the worst attacks came from rich, black celebrities who are expected to publicly whip one of their strays. Blinded by the limelight, by accolades from the “equity” industry, and by an extreme fear of being labeled as sellouts, these celebrities enslave themselves to a black metaverse that is completely detached from reality.
Vogue editor Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, with a net worth around $1.25 million, called it “hugely irresponsible,” and wrote, there was “no art here.”
“It didn’t land and it was deeply offensive, violent, and dangerous,” Karefa-Johnson tweeted.
Temple University professor Lamont Hill, net worth around $1 million, called West’s decision to wear the shirt “disgusting, dangerous, and irresponsible.”
Author Jemele Hill, net worth about $4 million, called West’s shirt-wearing a “dangerously dumb message to send for someone with his massive platform.”
Van Lathan, a producer and media personality with a net worth of about $1.5 million, tweeted that the slogan was a “white supremacist notion.”
“We don’t need a reminder of the worth of white lives,” Lathan wrote. “America is a shrine to the worth of white people. … The notion that it ALWAYS has to be about white people in America is incredibly frustrating, emotionally draining, and the whole problem.”
Writer Meecham Meriweather, with a net worth approaching $1 million, wrote that Kanye “doesn’t care about the black community,” something West blurted about George W. Bush after Hurricane Katrina.
Jaden Smith, Will’s son, net worth around $8 million, attended the show and walked out early, and later tweeted three words: “Black Lives Matter,” a tweet that rewarded him with tens of thousands of retweets and a quarter of million “likes,” among them Kendall Jenner.
Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, net worth approaching $1 billion, expressed reluctance to address “everything in the world that’s going on,” but was compelled to post an Instagram video about West’s shirt to his 19 million followers.
“Right now, all America has planned for us is poverty, incarceration, and death,” he said. “So, before I could get to any other lives matter, which all lives matter … that black lives matter, don’t play with it. Don’t wear the shirt. Don’t buy the shirt. Don’t play with the shirt. It’s not a joke.”
What planet do these people live on?
As imaginary grievances loop inside their brains, the problems in lagging black communities have become so severe that they’re spilling out everywhere. It’s obvious. Black crime is more random, more violent, and more vicious. There are more black fathers on TV commercials than in some neighborhoods. And somehow, morbid rap, twerking, and cop hatred has become ritualized as authentic black culture.
It's not enough that these people choose to lie incessantly about the things we see right in front of our faces, but they use ridicule, ostracism, even violence to pressure others to lie, too.
“[People with influence] have people that around them at all times, telling them what to be afraid of,” West told Carlson. “I think I started to really feel this need to express myself on another level when Trump was running for office and I liked him. My so-called friends-slash-handlers around me told me if I said that I liked Trump that my career would be over, that my life would be over. They said stuff like, ‘People get killed for wearing a hat like that.’ They threatened my life. They basically said that I would be I killed for wearing the hat.”
West said he got a call the night before Tucker’s interview from someone who threatened that anyone wearing a White Lives Matter shirt would be “greenlit” – a prison term that refers to “shanking” a person in the shower so he bleeds out before guards even notice he’s missing.
West, worth $6.6 billion according to Bloomberg, has said a lot of dumb stuff over the years, but somewhere between Hurricanes Katrina and Ian, he’s become more sensible – more determined to say the obvious at a time when his critics are more determined to ignore it. It’s refreshing.
For this, if nothing else, West deserves great credit – although, in the grand scheme of things in America since 2020, the gesture was more “too little, too late” than “better late than never,” especially for people who’ve literally died because of this stuff.
And at a time when so many obvious things are being lied about – border security, defunding the police, climate change, COVID-19, vaccine injuries, “the most secure election in American history,” men have babies, zero inflation, and “abortion is a woman’s reproductive rights,” – we’re going to need a whole lot more than “just a black man stating the obvious” to un-ring these bells.
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