Today in Paris, Kanye West sent “White Lives Matter” T-shirts down the runway at his YZYS9 presentation, and I honestly can’t tell if I should be writing about the impact of using a far-right slogan on a tee or ignoring it completely like you’re told to do when toddlers have tantrums.
Kanye West is an adult, and I don’t think this was a tantrum so much as a reaction, though I’m not completely sure what he’s reacting to. Can I just say that I am genuinely mortified for the Black woman who walked that runway, wearing a garment with a racist response to an important civil rights movement? It’s impossible to know her political ideology, or what autonomy she had while being dressed, but she lived through Black Lives Matter in real time, the same way we all did.
Where do we start with West? One of the things I like most about him is his unpredictability, his unwillingness to conform. He has a characteristic wit—direct and astute—with an unmistakable mix of ignorance and exuberance. Watching him operate is both thrilling and anxiety inducing. He is both benign and dangerous, forgettable and powerful. Yet the trouble with West is the energy can be too intense, the provocation can tip, he can overstep the mark.
Though you can trace his errant behaviors back to “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” to slavery “sounds like a choice,” to Taylor at the VMAs, his more recent actions have given many of us pause. There was something vulnerable and searingly sincere—yet also threatening—about the breakup with Kim Kardashian, the talking lovingly of his wife while also harassing her with flower deliveries. He’s always been reckless, but it’s terrifying seeing how far he’ll go and how little he leaves for the journey back.
Part of the endless appeal of West is working out whether his actions are by careful design, the result of pure impulse, or both. (He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2017, but I don’t want to even slightly insinuate that his mental health excuses his behavior.) His thinking is constantly intriguing; there is a sense that he’s operating from somewhere we can’t quite grasp, somewhere other. He is a master of keeping us talking about him, of provoking discourse, of jabbing at our sometimes-performative wokeness. We’ve seen him in a MAGA hat. We’ve seen him at the White House with Donald Trump. And now he’s matching “White Lives Matter” shirts with Candace Owens.
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