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 behaviours 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 behaviour.) 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.
It would be nice to swiftly dismiss the shirts as clout chasing. Another stunt to mess with the status quo, to ruffle feathers, to challenge. Depending on your viewpoint, the shirts are either dumb, flippant or dangerous. For me, they’re empowering right-wing ideology, further enabling its airtime when we should be stamping it out. Objectively, white lives do matter, but Black Lives Matter was not, as a movement, a commentary on the value of a non-Black person’s life. Those three words came to symbolise many facets of the Black experience, but the movement was, at its essence, focused on Black mortality rates being higher, especially when Black lives come into contact with law enforcement. Black Lives Matter was never anti-white but advocating for racial parity, concentrating on criminal justice reform. Black lives matter because they’re more at risk on the street, more at risk while getting arrested, more at risk in custody. This is not the same as saying white lives didn’t or don’t matter—it is simply redressing the imbalance. I’m sure Kanye West agrees, even if only broadly, on racial equality. But I’m afraid to say his “White Lives Matter” shirts won’t help.
This article first appeared on vogue.com
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