The BBC interview was personal and honest and heartfelt, but it was also frenetic and boastful and rambling at times—perfect fodder for late night TV, in other words. Kimmel mocked it by reproducing the interview with a black kid in place of West. When West took offense, and let loose a series of furious tweets, Kimmel gave the smirk of a comedian who couldn't see the big deal. You know the one; it climbs up only one side of the face, its meaning being:
It was just a joke. That Kanye West didn't take it as a joke isn't really a surprise, even if we ignore the fact that he's famously self-serious. Here he'd done an interview explaining how hurtful it is to have proved one's ability and still be seen as inferior by rich white people, and a rich white person responded by infantilizing him.
Was Jimmy Kimmel intentionally trying to humiliate Kanye West by treating him, literally, as a boy, a slur that still holds a lot of power in the black community? Probably not. And some of West's stream-of-conscious speech—complaints about paparazzi talking to him, complaints that Kim Kardashian isn't recognized as a reality star on the Walk of Fame—seem unrelated compared to his broader concerns about race and class as it pertained to Kimmel's sketch. Having paparazzi ask you questions when you're a celebrity is not an oppression at all comparable to police harassment or getting shot near your father's house. But it was direct, serious, and entirely pertinent when West said the following during the Kimmel interview (emphasis mine):
The way the fashion world works—there's no black guy at the end of the runway in Paris, in all honesty. When I'm in Paris and i'm sitting in fashion week for nine years and 'South Park' makes fun of our outfits or people don't understand why we're there—I'm getting called names, stuff you can't even say on TV—and I still can't break that wall down. ...
To have a meeting with [every big name fashion designer], and everyone just kinda looks at you like you're crazy, like you don't crash the internet. And you're just like, 'How can you get a shot?' And you try to do it on your own and no real designers will work for a rapper. You just cannot overcome it.
Kimmel may have just thought he was roasting another arrogant celebrity with his spoof; he almost certainly did, in fact. But looking at a black man's assertion he's been ignored because of his race and social class, and then recasting that man as a child for laughs, is always going to be an affront to many people of color in America, people who have long said, "something's wrong here," and been told:
no, you're just sensitive. You're crazy. You're acting like a baby.
I believe there are
numerous valid reasons to criticize Kanye West, but his rant on
Jimmy Kimmel Live is not one of them. You may think he sounded crazy, but it wasn't a kind of crazy that was foreign to me—or, I'd assume, millions of other Americans. It was the crazy that comes from being stared at for daring to look different while eating breakfast with your mom. It was the crazy that comes from never knowing if you deserved to be kicked out of that bar. It was the crazy that comes from being the one person stopped by a cop amidst a sea of white people. "This is racist," you might say to the cop. "Prove it," he might say back. And at that moment, you can't.
Good read.
keep this gossip out of HL
it's this big uproar and calamity about the shyt? 
