Just after Charlamagne's hour and a half long interview with Kanye West went live, Yeezy appeared on TMZ Live and revealed some ridiculous and hurtful thoughts about the history of slavery in America. Kanye, who has caused a firestorm for his support of Trump, far-right personalities, and wearing a "Make American Great Again" hat, declared that slavery sounded "like a choice."
"When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice," West said. "Like, you was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all? It's like, we're mentally in prison."
“I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks,” the rapper explained. “It’s like slavery, holocaust. Holocaust, Jews, Slavery is blacks. Prison is something that unites us as one race. Blacks and whites being one race.”
"Right now we're choosing to be enslaved," the rapper continued.
Charlamagne is awarded Kanye 'Donkey Of The Day' and giving him the credit for being stupid. Kanye's platform and voice is giant but he doesn't know how to communicate. While Charlamagne somewhat understands what he meant by his comment, it doesn't change the fact that Europeans went on kidnapping raids and African rulers and black merchants delivered captured people to trading post to sell them as slaves. Kanye's statement was highly inaccurate, there were always black people like Nate Turner and Harriet Tubman who rebelled against slavery.
Thank god for TMZ's Van Lathan who shut Yeezy down right there in the moment.
“Kanye, you’re entitled to your opinion, you’re entitled to believe whatever you want, but there is fact and real life consequence behind everything that you just said,” Lathan continued. “While you are making music and being an artist, and living the life that you’ve earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives.”
“We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was a choice,” he added. “Frankly, I’m disappointed, I’m appalled, and brother, I am unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something, to me, that’s not real.”
Listen to Donkey Of The Day below: