After a week of financial turmoil following anti-Semitic comments on social media and in interviews, Kanye West is addressing those thoughts, as well as what he said about George Floyd and Black Lives Matter.
In a strange 16-minute video shared by WmgLab Records on YouTube on Saturday and apparently recorded sometime after Adidas ended its business relationship with West on Tuesday, the artist appears to address a crowd of paparazzi and onlookers gathered outside from a building as it exits.
“I think Adidas felt that because everyone was collecting that they had the right to take my designs,” West told the small crowd.
“I feel like God is humbling me right now,” he continued. “Because two things happen. A lot of times when I would say, “I’m the richest black man,” it would be a defense I would use to talk about mental health. …What’s happening right now is that I’m being humbled.”
West continued to push back with 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 up, it brought us together as a people,” he said. “Well, I said that and questioned the death of George Floyd, it hurt my people. It hurts black people. So I want to apologize for hurting them [sic] because right now God has shown me with what Adidas is doing and what the media is doing, I know how it feels to have a knee on my neck right now. So thank you, God, for humbling me and letting me know how I really felt. Because how could the richest black man ever be humiliated except by not becoming a billionaire in front of everyone without a comment.”
West also discussed his “exhaustion” caused by backlash for wearing a MAGA hat that was “misdiagnosed” as a mental health disorder and his refusal to take a medication he said would take him “a pill” away from Michael Jackson or Prince. .
“In a time like this, if I was on medication right now, then a pill could have changed and it would have been Michael Jackson or Prince again,” West said.
He also compared himself to Emmett Till, who was brutally lynched in 1955 at the age of 14, and said at times that he felt like Malcolm 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 worried he had ruined his legacy. “God is alive.”
Anti-Semitic protesters referred to the West in signs erected in Los Angeles last weekend and in Jacksonville, Florida this weekend. In the video, West did not apologize for his anti-Semitic comments, but appeared to be trying to distance himself from any “hate group.”
The video shows anti-Semitic messages broadcast outside a football match
“I have nothing to do with any hate group,” West said as he closed his prayer remarks. “If any hatred happens to any Jew, it is not connected (gestures to himself) because I require everyone to walk in love.”
