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Kanye’s remarks are making such a seismic impact because no part of the explosion of media images dealing with LGBT people in recent years has come from or been targeted at the Black community. Despite all of the talk about how easily gay people have integrated into pop culture, as Kanye West points out, “the exact opposite word of ‘hip-hop,' I think, is ‘gay’” – which makes it the opposite of a defining part of young, Black life and culture.
Black people must see other Black people confront homophobia, and must see LGBT people as Black people as well, if we are ever going to make real progress shifting attitudes. Kanye, bravely and boldly, has realized this fact. And his testimony couldn’t have come at a more apt time, in the midst of a summer in which we have once again heard startling news about HIV’s rampage among Black gay men – a reality that, in no small part, is driven by the Black community’s failure to embrace and support us.
Kanye opened his story on MTV by talking about his close relationship with his mother, which is captured in a song on his new CD entitled “Hey Mama.” He explained that growing up with his mother meant that he also took on some of her mannerisms. When he got to high school, this fact meant he was often ridiculed for being a “fag.” And, in turn, he became very homophobic.
But when Kanye learned through one of his cousins that another cousin in the family was gay, he began to rethink his stance. "It was kind of like a turning point,” he told MTV VJ Sway, “when I was like, `Yo, this is my cousin. I love him and I've been discriminating against gays.'"
And there it was, the cycle of homophobia broken.
Kanye’s seeing his cousin as gay helped to humanize Black LGBT people in his eyes and prompted him to in turn abandon the sort of knee-jerk attitudes that prevent people like his cousin from being able to come out in the first place. As Kanye so articulately explained in describing the roots of his own homophobia, “If you see something and you don't want to be that because there's such a negative connotation toward it, you try to separate yourself from it so much that it made me homophobic by the time I was through high school. Anybody that was gay I was like, ‘Yo, get away from me.’”
It is often assumed that the Black community is more homophobic than the white gay community. But while there is certainly homophobia in the Black community, the buzz surrounding Kanye’s remarks shows the real issue may be how rarely the topic is actually addressed substantively and humanly.
- kenyon farrow, "Kanye West Rewrites Hip-Hop’s Gay Record," Black AIDS Institute august 22, 2005
posted August 23, 2005 in print. 200220012000