The Times: Essential news from the L.A. Times

When the celebrity bigot is a Black man

Episode Summary

The artist formerly known as Kanye West and NBA superstar Kyrie Irving are facing lost endorsements and suspensions over their antisemitic statements and actions. What's next?

Episode Notes

Right now, there’s a lot of attention being paid to Black male celebrities and their controversial statements and actions. Dave Chapelle has been criticized for his comments about trans people. Artist Ye (formerly Kanye West) and star NBA player Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets are under fire for pushing antisemitic sentiments.

It’s something we’ve seen before — but is there a double standard when the bigot is Black? Read the full transcript here.

Host: Gustavo Arellano

Guests: L.A. Times columnist LZ Granderson

More reading:

Column: Kanye West’s life and art are one. You don’t have to keep watching

Kyrie Irving suspended by Brooklyn Nets for failure to disavow antisemitism

Column: What I want Dave Chappelle to understand about the color of queerness

Episode Transcription

GUSTAVO: The artist Ye — formerly known as Kanye West — has long been critically praised. Not just for his music, but also his fashion and business sense.

But right now he's better known for spewing hate.

Ye's tweeted about how he wants to go “death con 3” on Jewish people. He's worn T-shirts that say White Lives Matter and dehumanized the death of George Floyd. 

The fallout and reaction to all of this has been immediate and far-reaching.

Tape: Adidas is just the latest company to end connections with Ye, who has also been suspended from Twitter and Instagram. A completed documentary about Kanye West has also been shelved and his talent agency also dropped him. 

GUSTAVO: Those are just some of the ties cut with Ye. And he's not the only Black celebrity in trouble for his statements and actions right now. 

Dave Chappelle has been under a lot of controversy over the past year for his comments about trans people. And just recently, star NBA player Kyrie Irving of the Brooklyn Nets promoted a movie that included negative antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories.

Irving tape 2: The Brooklyn Nets suspended guard Kyrie Irving for at least five games for what the team called a repeated failure to unequivocally say he has no antisemitic beliefs.

GUSTAVO: Both Ye and Irving have apologized and walked back some of what they've said.

Ye tape: And I questioned the death of George Floyd, it hurt my people. It hurt the Black people. So I wanna apologize to hurting them because right now God has shown me by what Adidas is doing and by what the media is doing, I know how it feels to have a knee on my neck now. 

Irving tape: I take my responsibility for posting that. Some things that were questionable in there, untrue. I didn't mean to cause any harm. 

GUSTAVO: But each has lost fans and money – and maybe more to come.

GUSTAVO: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times. It's Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022.

Today: Is there a double standard in society when the bigot is a famous Black man?

GUSTAVO: LZ Granderson is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, and he writes about culture, politics, sports and navigating life in America. LZ, welcome to The Times. 

LZ Granderson: Thank you very much, G. How are you?

GUSTAVO: Good. Just, uh, Ye, man. Like I'm so old school. I'm still stuck on when he used to do his albums with a big bear on the cover or inside, you know. Because that's when my brother was growing up, like he was growing up and he loved Ye. But were you ever a Ye fan?

LZ: Yeah of course. The man has sold north of 60 million records worldwide. It's kind of hard not to find someone who doesn't appreciate some of his music, so yeah. Of course. I was a Ye fan. Notice the past tense.

GUSTAVO: Yeah. I mean, what was it about his music or about him that you liked for so long?

LZ: Kanye as a MC is nowhere near someone I would bring up, to be quite honest with you. But as a producer, oh God. Kanye's ear is impeccable.

The way that he layers, and samples that he finds, they're not random. They are really intimately tied to the overall theme of the songs that he's producing. And so when it comes to actually putting together pieces that seem to be very far away and non-related to each other, he has a sonic ear that's able to hear the symphony before it's constructed. So by the time he gets in the recording studio and lays down tracks, he's got this amazing, like unheard-of song beat drop of rhythm, mood, flow. And there aren't a lot of people in hip-hop or just in music in general who has that ability.

He's got a couple of songs that are sneaky good that is not on his record, but he produced. And that's when I knew Kanye was really special. And the first one actually was with Beyonce, and it was “Party,” and it has a really nice R&B groove to it with a nice infusion of hip-hop.

Music: You were bad girl and your friend’s bad too. Oh, we got the swag sauce, she dripping swagu. 

LZ: And it didn't sound like Kanye to me. I didn't know who it was at first until I really listened to the voices that were on the track. But when you listen to just the music itself, you're just like, wow, this is really textured and it's complex. And it wasn't a fight, if you will. They were working with one another. And I think “Party” by Beyonce is one of those songs. And when I think about “Jesus Walks,” which is considered perhaps his greatest song, that regardless of your musical background or genre that you prefer, because of the themes of the song, because of the way that he layers the vocals, the samples, the drive, the theme of the lyrics.

Music: Jesus walks, God, show me the way because the devil's trying to break me down. Jesus walk with me, with me. 

LZ: If you're a Christian, you find interest in it. If you're a hip-hop star, you find interest in it. If you are just someone who listens to pop radio, it has a great beat and you may just listen to it and not care about the lyrics. It has something for everyone, which is the reason why I repeatedly said in my column, he just knows what works. He's of that spectrum where he's almost like a chameleon. And perhaps this is part of the reason why he has been able to maintain his place despite all the comments. It's because his abilities are so rare and so special. People have given him so many passes over the years because of it.

GUSTAVO: Yeah, he’s definitely built this huge, hardcore fanbase that forgave him for basically everything, laughed off whatever he did until now. You used to be part of that. Your ESPN Radio morning show used Kanye’s song “Good Morning,” for a while.  

LZ: Yeah, it was just a vibe, man, you know, do-do-do. Good morning. Do-do-do… 

Music: Good morning. Good morning.

LZ: So when ESPN LA hired me to do the morning drive with Keyshawn Johnson and Jorge Sedano, you know, one of the things we had to figure out was how we were gonna start our show. And I believe it was our producer Raj who suggested Kanye's “Good Morning.” And without hesitation, we all agreed because it's just a perfect vibe. New York radio, sports radio, is very confrontational and angry and in your face. Even when they win championships, they're mad. But L.A. is different. You know, we're a different vibe; we're more laid back, we're more chill. And we lost a championship or got kicked outta the playoffs, we knew that L.A. listeners didn't wanna come in hot. We wanted to have a nice steady simmer. And that's what Kanye's “Good Morning” was able to do for us, help us bring it to the morning. It's like you walk into the kitchen, you poured a cup of coffee, sit with your boys. You all make eye contact. No one's talking yet. And then Kanye says, “Good morning.” And that's kinda like, All right, let's have this talk. And it just kinda set the scene. And it was perfect until it wasn't, because when he said that Black people basically chose to remain enslaved for 400 years, I could no longer listen to his voice and not think about those comments and how he had been so disrespectful to our ancestors. And it ruined the song for me.

GUSTAVO: Yeah, you’re talking when Kanye went on TMZ Live in 2018 and said 400 years of slavery was a choice that Black people made. And he later apologized and walked those comments back a bit. But it was just so dissonant to the Kanye people that so many people thought they knew. I’m thinking back in 2005, during a nationally televised benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina victims, when Kanye was on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum.

Kanye tape: George Bush doesn't care about Black people. The way America is set up to help the, um, uh, the poor, the Black people, the the less well off, as slow as possible. I hate the way they portray us in the media. If you see a Black family, it says they're looting. You see a white family, it says they're looking for food.. 

GUSTAVO: This is a guy who refused to play in Arizona for a couple of years because of SB 1070, the bill there that made life miserable for undocumented people. But now all people can think about is not that Kanye, but the Ye of today.

LZ: Yeah, it's a disturbing timeline. And maybe it's disturbing because when he initially started making controversial statements, I wasn't offended by them. Maybe they were always disturbing. Maybe he was always disturbing. But because it wasn't necessarily something I disagreed with or something that I didn't enjoy, that I didn't register in the same way. And that's on me. I'm not gonna sit here and say that's the community. Everyone can make their own decisions and take on personal responsibilities when it comes to that. But you know, when he went up on stage with Taylor Swift at the MTV Music Awards, I thought it was hilarious at first.

Tape: A lot of things were going through Taylor Swift's mind when Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech. 
“Wow, I can't believe I won. This is awesome. Don't trip and fall. I'm gonna get to thank the fans. This is so cool. Oh, Kanye West is here.” 
“Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.” 

LZ: Looking back on it, especially the way that he's been handling other women in his life, whether they be romantic or otherwise — that was rather misogynistic, and he should have been called out for that then. 

GUSTAVO: We'll have more after the break.

GUSTAVO: So LZ, Ye has now had a couple of years of these awful moments; saying and doing awful things publicly. But once he started saying these antisemitic remarks, only then does he start losing his endorsements and seeing other consequences for his actions. What was it about these particular moments, or this moment in time, that caused way more of an uproar than in the past? 

LZ: Well, let's talk about what the others are first, right? Anti-Blackness, well that seems to be pretty acceptable in society, right?

GUSTAVO: Sadly, yeah. 

LZ:  Um, anti-LGBTQ comments and verses in some of his songs, not like we haven't heard that before, right? So when you consider what some of the other offenses were, there were groups that we've been conditioned to accept being treated in that fashion, particularly Black. We're used to anti-Blackness. Cause the reason why hip-hop has been able to thrive in a lot of ways by having lyrics that tear down each other within the Black community. But as soon as we say something about gay people, there's a problem because anti-Blackness is much more readily acceptable. But antisemitic attitudes after World War II, much like Germany and much like most of Western Europe, we just don't have a tolerance for that. And it's because of the real-time damage that we all saw vis-a-vis the war and obviously what Hitler and the Nazis did to the Jewish people.

You know, there's different kinds of power in the world. There's influence, there's legislative, there's economic. And when you look at Kanye in particular, you know, he seems to be a holder of all three. And because of that, he has a lot of influence. Now, I don't tend to think that people who are white supremacists need a Black hip-hop artist from Chicago to tell them to say antisemitic things. But what he does do is give them cover so that they can say their things and not take responsibility for saying them. And that is the real danger of having men like Kanye say what they say.

GUSTAVO: Yeah. And what does it say about that then? That we are so conditioned to hear and experience anti-Blackness, anti queerness and misogyny, misogynoir, that we accept — not accept it, but get seemingly less outraged as a society than some other phobias. 

LZ: Well first of all, I would challenge you and say we do accept it.

GUSTAVO: Yeah. Huh?

LZ: Drake’s latest album is pretty misogynist. And it's pretty misogynistic lyrically in terms of the women that he goes after and how he goes after them and why he goes after them. And he's always sort of rapped about them being disposable. We do have a certain level of comfort that we have when it comes to anti-Blackness in pop culture, anti-queerness in pop culture and unfortunately misogyny as well. I mean, if you listen to Drake's new album and the way that he talks to Megan Thee Stallion, who was shot.

Music: This bitch lie about getting shot, but she's still a stallion. She don't even get the joke, but she's still smiling

LZ: Or the way he talks about Serena Williams, who was rumored to be one of his love interests and he kinda like goes off on her husband for no apparent reason.

Music: Sabar Serena, your husband a groupie. He claim he don't got a problem. But no boo. It is like you coming for sushi.

LZ: That's not cool responsible man behavior. That's just like chauvinistic pig behavior. But we are so used to it now, in pop culture in general, in hip-hop, perhaps particularly that we've just sort of accepted it, but it's not cool. It was never cool, but we've just been conditioned to accept it. When you get into the area of antisemitism, there's still this thread in society that recognizes this as instantly being wrong. And unfortunately, we don't have that thread when it comes to Blackness, when it comes to queerness, when it to treatment of women. It would be nice if we did, but we don't.

GUSTAVO: So what do you say to Ye fans, then, who are still sticking with him?

LZ: Listen, I believe that everyone is responsible for their own decisions when it comes to the artists that they support. And I am not going to try to play the thought police, nor am I gonna try and play the morality police when it comes to which artist you listen to, which artist you support versus who you do and who you don't. Because everyone has their own individual lines that they don't want crossed, their red lines, if you will. Kanye crossed mine. 

GUSTAVO: What about corporations?

LZ: Come on, man, what? Corporations are there for one reason and one reason only: to make money. And they're going to do what they think is best to make money. And if it's best to get rid of someone to make money, they'll do it. If it's OK to keep someone, because the cost of keeping them is cheaper than the cost of getting rid of them, they'll do that as well. Do not look at corporations for morality. Now, you can use morality as a way to help motivate a capitalistic venture, but be not mistaken, the capitalistic venture comes first. Very few businesses are willing to just let millions, if not billions, of dollars walk out the door because people are upset. You know, they need to see the finances of that anger first. And I think that's one of the reasons why people ask, why did Adidas wait so long. I think that's one of the reasons why. They were trying to do the math. They were trying to see how long could they let that wave ride before they had to make a decision. And they waited about as long as anyone could.

GUSTAVO: Yeah, then Adidas announced that even though they’re done with Ye as a spokesperson, they’re not done with his designs. They still plan to sell Ye’s brand on their own. 

LZ: I can't think of anything more offensive than continuing to sell the shoe without Kanye's name. And I like if that's Adidas' attempt to try to like save the baby and throw out the bathwater they need to workshop that. Cause what that sounds like is theft. 

What that sounds like to me is beyond appropriation. It's just theft. If you're going to discontinue the relationship with the artist, then let the artist have their art. Don't steal the art from the artist and then try to continue to make money without them. That to me is highly offensive and honestly, quite racist; blatantly racist. And so many artists throughout time in this country have had their arts taken from them, appropriated or flatly stolen from them. And they've seen other artists or businesses flourish with their content while they continue to struggle. Or why stick with art? Why not go into how the U.S. government refused to allow Black people to have patents? And so our creations, our inventions were stolen from us: stolen. We weren't able to profit off of them because we couldn't patent them, but we created them. No, Adidas needs to go back and workshop that. They need to get a book. They need to read it. They need to figure out a better solution. Or they could just stick with the original plan, which is cut ties with him. If they're gonna cut ties with him, the art is him.

GUSTAVO: More after the break.

GUSTAVO: Okay, LZ, we talked about, Ye. Let's move on to another famous Black man getting criticized right now for his recent comments, NBA star Kyrie Irving. Here's another guy who's been saying and doing controversial things for a while. Give us his walk of shame from the past. 

LZ: Haha. Walk of shame… Kyrie, I know, really sort of tries to consider himself a philosopher and a deep thinker, and I'm sure in a lot of ways he is. But because he is so arrogant with it,

GUSTAVO: Hmm.

LZ: And so narcissistic with it that when he does find himself out of his depth, you find yourself enjoying it a little bit. You’re like, ha, you thought you know it all, now let’s see you get yourself out of this. And this is one of those situations where he has, so back in the past when he talked about the Earth being flat, right? And he was digging in his heels and you didn't know if he was trolling us or not. He was trying to come across as this really thoughtful, brilliant sort of guy, when it came to the vaccine.

Kyrie Irving: Nobody should be forced to do anything with their bodies. Like you only get one of these. If you choose to get vaccine, I support you. If you choose to be unvaccinated, I support you. Do what's best for you.

LZ: Then when you ask him the more probing questions, you realize, yeah, you’re  not thoughtful at all. You’re just on the internet like everybody else. But his attitude in terms of the way that he was handling the situation, again, the arrogance, the narcissism, the fake sort of intellectualism where he comes across as a well-read person, but then you realize, oh, you're just getting your stuff off the internet.

GUSTAVO: That was mostly last season. What’s the latest trouble Kyrie’s gotten into? 

LZ: Kyrie tweeted out a link to a film that's on Amazon and it's a pretty, to me, straightforward antisemitic film. As soon as you start wading into Holocaust denial, you're antisemitic. And I don't care about the backstory of how you arrive at that place. We can talk about anti-Blackness in the Jewish community, just like we could talk about, antisemitism in the Black community. We could have those separate conversations for sure. But once you start getting, wading into, you know, Holocaust denial, which this film does, as well as leading to stereotypes about Jewish people as a way of trying to uplift Black people, that's just trash in my opinion. You don't need to step on someone's neck to be taller.

GUSTAVO: Yeah. I mean we do have right now, so two prominent Black men, Ye and Irving, being punished or criticized for pushing these antisemitic thoughts. Do you see them being able to come back from that? And the reason I ask is because, we've had white celebrities in the past say stuff that's similar if not even worse, and yet they're still doing their thing.

LZ: I don't like to measure what people of color do in comparison to what white people do. Cause it's not always one and the same. We know plenty of examples of individuals who fall up and we know plenty of examples of people who fall out. And far too often, to fall out, looks like people like me, right? When you're talking about head coaching, when you're talking about university presidents, et cetera. We don't get that many opportunities. Once we get the one opportunity, you screw it up, eh, it's hard for you to bounce back. But with that being said, I think both individuals from a resource department will be able to sustain the sort of shun from the industry very much in a way that Mel Gibson was able to sustain himself until he was allowed to come back and start doing work again. So, yeah, I think they both can come back. They won't be the same media personalities, they won't be the same advertising draw, but in terms of being able to go on with their careers, I think they will be able to go back to that part of their lives, but they would no longer be able to hold the same footprint in terms of the public goodwill.

GUSTAVO: You mentioned earlier that people like you and I, we fall out and other folks seem to fall up. Obviously, you know, who makes these double standards, society, racism, all that, but how much does the media and also the public at large play in making those double standards. 

LZ: We give permission to what's acceptable. It's one of the reasons why I went after Dave Chappelle when it came to some of his queer jokes.

GUSTAVO: Yeah.

AP tape:  Last year, Dave Chappelle and Netflix created a furor when his standup special “The Closer” was accused of anti-trans humor by gay rights groups and some Netflix employees.

LZ: I think Dave Chappelle is a genius. I love Dave Chappelle. Never wanted Dave Chappelle canceled, never talked about him being canceled, just wanted him to readdress the way he hit, dealt with queer humor. And I think when you come to some of the other artists who have, let's say, found themselves in trouble and have tried to work their way back, I think one of the first things they do is they disappear for a little bit and they let other tragedies or other people take their place in terms of getting beat up. And hopefully when they reemerge, they come back better. And obviously with a better kinda spin. 

GUSTAVO: It would be harder for Kyrie to disappear unless he completely retired. Because athletes need to play at least once a year, you know? Ye, on the other hand, can say “I’m taking a sabbatical for a long-ass time,” and no one would blink. Lot of musicians or artists or filmmakers do that.

LZ: With Kyrie, he's suspended now and no telling how long he'll be suspended and maybe he'll be suspended for the season. And the way that sports journalism works in particular, if you could throw a football really far, we might just forgive some rape allegations, you know. 

GUSTAVO: We're not gonna say which quarterback had that but yeah. 

LZ: Yeah… I'm just saying, man, we got a history. In my industry, in journalism and sports journalists in particular, in society, we have a well-established history when it comes to athletes who behave poorly. That if they can still quote unquote “get the job done” on the field, or the court, or the diamond, what have you, then we'd like to use the word redemption as if their performance on the field, or the court, or the diamond has anything to do with the off the field, court or diamond activities that they got them in trouble to begin with. But, Kyrie, he can disappear from the suspension, come back, he drops 50, we're gonna forget about some stuff. He hits the game winner, we're gonna forget about some stuff. He leads Brooklyn to the championship, we're gonna forget about everything. So that's just the way that we like to parse when it comes to athletes who behave badly.

GUSTAVO: You know, we're talking about all these things that both Ye and Kyrie have said. They've also, though, admitted to struggling with their mental health, and some fans say that's why we need to be more forgiving of them because we don't know if they're saying these things under duress or what's happening. How much do you buy that stance? 

LZ: Well, I think that when it comes to the conversations of mental health that we're still very young in this country, in this culture, in being able to have substantive, intelligent conversations about it, we just now gave men permission to cry. We just gave athletes permission to say, I actually have mental health issues. So we're still new in all of this. So that's also part of the reason why I feel that when you look at, particularly in the world of the NBA, when people say, well how come the NBA players are saying X, Y and Z? Well, it's because they also are aware that Kyrie has talked about his mental health issues and no one knows how to talk about mental health, right? So it's better not to say anything in a lot of ways than say something out of pocket, trying to stand up for one thing and then offending another. And particularly when it comes to Kyrie, this is someone who has so much respect from a skill set perspective who does a lot in the community that people don't talk about because we don't talk about that in athletes in general, and someone that a lot of people like and they don't understand what's happening either. But they also know that he has mental health issues and so they're gonna be a little hesitant to come out very hard against him in this situation because of all of that. Doesn't make it right. I'm just trying to illuminate why when people say, how come the NBA hasn't come out stronger in terms of the players? Well, that's part of it. No excuse for hate, but at least let's create some room for humanity. And the same thing when it comes to Kanye. You know, a lot of people still think, and you see it all the time, when his mother died tragically, in surgery, he wasn't the same person. And of course people say, well, my mother died and I didn't start spewing hate. And that's very true, but everyone's mental health issue is not the same.

And so I'm not trying to say call them out and hold 'em accountable for their actions. I'm just saying that we also make sure that we do so through the prism of humanity because they may be struggling and we may not know how to help them, but they clearly may need some help.

GUSTAVO:  Finally, LZ, you wrote a column about Ye, and you kept going back to, almost like a mantra: He knows what works. In other words, your grand unified theory of Ye is that everything he does is part of a bigger project for him, at least in his mind. And what you said makes sense in a way, if we take the angle that everything that Ye has done since at least the Trump presidency is a shift from his earlier attacks on the right and that now what he's trying to do in some ways is make a case for, I don't know, like, free thinking or Black conservatism or something like that? 

LZ: I don't know if he is someone you wanna classify as the new Black conservative. I don't know if he's someone you want to classify as even politically leaning or even someone who's interested in politics in that fashion. But he does know how to push buttons. He knows how to move crowds. He knows how to gather attention.

AP tape: “But ever since Trump won, it proved that I could be president.” Among the ideas that make up Kanye West's platform is that abortion should be legal, but mothers given financial incentives to discourage it, say a million dollars. He also says Underground Railroad conductor. Harriet Tubman never actually freed the slaves. She just had them work for other white people.

LZ: He knows how to maintain attention, and he knows how to maximize that attention so that he can continue to have attention. He's established that over and over again. You don't get to sell 60 million records in a relatively fast period of time, if you ask me, unless you have an understanding of how to move the crowd. 

GUSTAVO:. LZ, thank you so much for this conversation.

LZ: Thank you very much for having me

GUSTAVO: And that's it for this episode of The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times Ashlea Brown and David Toledo were the jefes on this episode and Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it. Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, David Toledo, Kasia Broussalian and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez.

Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto, Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany, and our theme music is by Andrew Eapen. I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Friday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.