(Excerpt)
Does Kanye truly love his mother, and therefore Black women, by extension, or is he simply in love with the idea of making his mother a martyr? While the academy he created in her honour and his penchant for naming his artistic projects after her may point to the former, to attempt to excuse his racist, misogynistic tirades as an attempt to be closer to her memory is facetious. Donda West died due to complications in the aftermath of her cosmetic surgery. Recently, Kanye took to Instagram to cyberbully Vogue Editor Gabrielle Kareefa Johnson after she called him out for his “White Lives Matter” stunt at Paris Fashion week. The same man whose mother died trying to change how she looked, making fun of another Black woman, for how she looks.
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It’s behaviour that I’ve witnessed several times. Black women are held under the impossible standards of being both saints and sinners. Black men, publicly facing Black men in particular, uphold their mothers as pillars of godliness, while at the same time tearing down and destroying Black women. DaBaby, who features on the album in celebration of a Black woman, continues to support Tory Lanez, a man who shot Meghan Thee Stallion, another Black woman (and seems to have gotten away with it). The idea is distant from its reality, and intentionally so, because to embrace the reality would mean to embrace years of disrespect towards Black women. Kanye’s idea is beautiful to uphold. The reality, that Black women still live at the bottom of the social totem pole, is less stunning. In this light, Kanye’s mother is no angel. She is yet another victim of the world he continues to perpetuate.