During the Hurricane Katrina incident of 2005, rapper Kanye West famously stated that President Bush “doesn’t care about black people.” How the tables have turned. Now, GQ columnist Damon Young asserts that “Kanye West doesn’t care about black people” over his newfound embrace of President Trump and black conservative commentator Candace Owens.
In his latest piece for The Root’s VSB (Very Smart Brothas), Young laments the hurt that Kanye’s actions have brought to his many black fans. He begins by first recalling how one of his best friends lost touch with his own mother — his own flesh and blood — during the 2016 election because she dared to support Trump for president and wear a MAGA hat around her son. Because of political differences and tribalist thought, a family was broken.
“He is still troubled by what he believes his mother forced him to do,” writes Young. “He is still bothered by the thought of his piece hurting his mother’s feelings, because while she did what she did, she’s still his mom. But he knows he did the right thing.”
According to Young, the very act of wearing the MAGA hat endorses white supremacy and induces disgust in black people. By wearing one, Young asserts that Kanye West has aroused “fury and disgust” among those who love him, a sentiment that his narcissism blinds him from seeing:
Kanye’s recent actions have shown, in a clear and unambiguous fashion, that he doesn’t care about black people. Black people who have supported him and amplified him and even shielded him from and defended him against the type of people he’s aligning himself with. Black people who watched him grow from the person with the name we didn’t quite know how to pronounce who kept getting production credits on Jay-Z and Cam’Ron tracks to arguably the most important person in hip-hop. Black people who made him.
Young ultimately predicts that Kanye will fall hard from his stunt with President Trump and the only people that will be there to pick him up are the black people he has jilted, “not because they are gullible or weak, but because they’re aware of the pathology of white supremacy, and they possess an empathy for someone who allows himself to be so infected by it.”
In other words, West has been bamboozled into “the sunken place.” Another writer at The Root, Michael Harriot, said something similar to this effect recently.
Young’s body of work ranges from calling white people “useless” and lamenting about being “surrounded by whiteness.”
