CNN
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After a week of financial fallout following anti-Semitic comments on social media and in interviews, Kanye West comments on those thoughts, as well as what he has said about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.
In a rambunctious 16-minute video shared by WmgLab Records on YouTube Saturday and apparently recorded at some point after Adidas ended its business relationship with West on Tuesday, the artist appears to address a crowd of paparazzi and bystanders gathered outside a building. as he went out.
“I think Adidas felt like everyone was telling me they had a right to just take my designs,” West told the small crowd.
“I feel like this is God humiliating me now,” he continued. ‘Because two things happen. Often if I were to say, “I’m the richest black man,” that would be a defense I would use for the mental health conversation. … What is happening right now is that I am being humiliated.”
West went on to criticize his suggestion in a recent podcast interview that George Floyd’s death was caused by the use of fentanyl.
“When the idea of Black Lives Matter came out, we came together as people,” he said. “So I said that, and I questioned George Floyd’s death, it hurt my people. It hurt the black people. So I want to apologize for hurting them [sic] because God has shown me right now through what Adidas is doing, and through what the media is doing, I know what it feels like to have a knee on my neck right now. So thank you, God, for humiliating me and letting me know what it really felt like. Because how can the richest black man ever be humiliated, other than not becoming a billionaire in front of everyone from a comment.”
West also discussed his “exhaustion” caused by the reaction to wearing a MAGA hat that had been “misdiagnosed” as a mental disorder and his refusal to take medication that he said would be “one pill” away from Michael. Jackson or Prince.
“At a time like this, if I was on medication now, one pill could have been switched, and it would have been Michael Jackson or Prince all over again,” West said.
He also compared himself to Emmett Till, who was brutally lynched at age 14 in 1955, and said he sometimes felt like Malcom X and Martin Luther King, Jr.
“I’m just not worried. Period,” West said in response to someone in the crowd who asked him if he was afraid he had ruined his legacy. “God lives.”
Anti-Semitic protesters referred to West in signs posted in Los Angeles last weekend and in Jacksonville, Florida this weekend. In the video, West made no apologies for his anti-Semitic comments, but seemed to try to distance himself from any “hate group.”
“I have no association with any hate group,” West said, closing his comments in prayer. “If any hatred comes on a Jewish person, it is not associated (gestures to himself) because I demand that everyone walk in love.”
