Kanye West has defended his “White Lives Matter” t-shirt after receiving backlash for it.
The rapper sat down for an interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson on Thursday, October 6.
During the interview, he said he wore the “White Lives Matter” t-shirt at a Paris fashion show because “they do.”
The 45-year-old rapper also appeared shocked by the backlash the stunt caused.
Ye said: “I do certain things from a feeling. I just channel the energy, it just feels right. It’s using a gut instinct, a connection with God and just brilliance.”
Kanye said his father had reached out to him about the shirt, and told him he thought it was funny.
Kanye said: “I thought the shirt was a funny shirt. I thought the idea of wearing it was funny. And I said ‘Dad why do you think it’s funny?’ And he said ‘just a black man stating the obvious.'”
Kanye went on to speak to Calson about the public outrage in reaction to the T-shirt.
He said: “They’re looking for an explanation — as an artist you don’t have to give an explanation but as a leader you do.
“So the answer to why I wrote ‘White Lives Matter’ on a shirt is they do. It’s an obvious thing.”
When Carlson asked Kanye what he thought made the “White Lives Matter” statement so controversial, West blamed “a group mob” of “liberal nazis” as well as the media, which he said pushes white societal norms.
He said: “Because the same people that have stripped us of an identity and labeled us as a color have told us what it means to be black and the vernacular you’re supposed to have.”
He told an anecdote about his father, a former Black Panther, facing racial discrimination growing up in Delaware as one of the only, if not the only, black families around. When his father attended a black university, West said his father was told by his black classmates that he “talked white.”
Kanye said the controversy behind the shirt stemmed from a black girl saying she “felt traumatized,” after seeing it.
Ye said: “It’s like a black girl saying ‘I felt traumatized when I saw a black man wearing something he wasn’t supposed to wear.'”
He compared it to the movie Quinten Tarantino’s 2012 film “Django Unchained,” in which Samuel L. Jackson’s character, a house slave, is upset with Jamie Fox’s character, a free black man, for riding on a horse in antebellum America.
“If we saw ourselves as a people and not a race then we would treat our people better,” West said.
“In America, we as blacks we’ll look down each other on how good we speak. But we’re speaking English. There’s nothing whiter than English. We’re not in our native tongue, actually. So we judge each other on white goal lines, not based on exactly what our culture is based on.”
Kanye, who wore a MAGA hat during his visit with former President Donald Trump at the White House in 2018 and previously wore a jacket with the Confederate flag on it back in 2013, told Carlson that the support he’s expressed for President Donald Trump and other issues has isolated him from friends and even put him at risk of violent attacks.
“My so-called friends/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 killed for wearing the hat,” West said.
“I had someone call me last night and said anybody wearing a white lives matter shirt is going to be green-lit. That means they are going to beat them up if they wear it. I’m like, you know, okay, green light me then.”
