Kanye West: Self-serving Ideologue or Transformative Visionary?

Kanye West is never one to shy away from controversy and he surely didn’t disappoint at the 2015 BET Honors Awards. While accepting his visionary award “for his courage and creativity for inspiring the world,” in typical Kanye fashion, he delivered a fiery, long-winded, 9-minute speech that touched on any and every thing race related from Harriet Tubman to interracial marriage to a personal connection to O.J. Simpson and so on.

We knew we were in for a special treat when he asked to put down his award so he could talk. He started off innocuously enough by saying he felt humbled for once which brought out the requisite chuckles.

As for the speech itself, some especially poignant parts of his diatribe included:

Touching on both his relationship with Minister Louis Farrakhan and Farrakhan’s attitude toward Kanye and Kim Kardashian’s interracial Marriage:

“And, it was interesting or ground breaking and really special for me to see his reaction and his expression about my relationship with the woman not of color. And for us to focus on the idea of love and not the idea of separation.

On the stereotype that well-off black men seek out white women:

“… people always talk about ‘man, you know, when a — when an entertainer get on, of course, you know, he gon’ go and get a white girl and all this.’ But I want to say that, you know and ‘the white girl gonna go get a rich black dude.’ And you know, but I want to say that my wife has dated broke black dudes, you know.

On his personal connection to O.J. Simpson because of Kim’s father, Robert:

“Robert Kardashian was the genius that put together the defense team that got O.J. off.”

On a racial anecdote that Robert related to Kim:

“’You may have a black child. A beautiful, beautiful, beautiful black child. And it’s gonna be hard. You’re gonna see how hard it is.’”

On Harriet Tubman’s struggles:

“Harriet Tubman said she could’ve freed more only if they knew they weren’t free.

So they don’t think that because we can afford this custom Balmain suit that we’re free. And don’t think that because we can buy a $300,000 car that we’re free.”

On a final note:

“And when we have the chance to express it and to influence, don’t only just do it for us, do it for the human race.”

While there seemed to be some valid points and a lot of kernels of truth mixed in with some raw honesty, it seems like some of his points fell a little flat and even seemed quite hypocritical coming from Kanye himself.

He’s one of the biggest braggarts around, so while his analogy of black people still not being entirely free while being relatively more well-off rings true, it’s hard to hear it from the man who once said “I rather buy 80 gold chains and go ig’nant, I know Spike Lee gon’ kill me, but let me finish, Blame it on the pigment, we living no limits.”

As far as interracial marriage, it always seems that Kanye is more obsessed about it than anyone else. It’s like he always feels the need to justify or explain. Really, who cares? Plenty of people are in interracial marriages. If you feel like people have something against you or your wife, it may that people generally have something against both of you for a wide variety of reasons but that’s a whole other post.

What did you think of the speech? Real? Hypocritical? Genius? Lame? Should he have even won a Visionary Award? Weigh in and let us know what you really feel. #TellUsHowYouReallyFeel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ic1H5BPRsmc