When I first saw this image on social media, I believed that Candace Owens and Kanye West were trolling and did it for attention and marketing purposes. I did not get upset when I saw the image but I did wonder to myself how they were going to justify this stunt. Their plan worked as everyone was talking about it on social media and the pair received major backlash. Black outrage is a marketing tool used by some organisations, who purposefully do something racist that will anger black people in order to get a reaction. At the end of the day bad publicity is still publicity.
Kanye West is no stranger to controversy, he is the same guy that goes on rants and has previously said “slavery was a choice”. Candace Owens is no stranger to controversy either, she will speak her mind regardless of what other people think of her. Kanye and Candace are married to white people and have half white children, so of course White Lives Matter to them. Do I agree that white lives matter? Of course. Every human life matters. I do understand in this social context that “White Lives Matter’ is perceived as an attack on the “Black Lives Matter” movement which is about racial injustice and Police brutality against black people. Hence, why I do think what they did was racially insensitive considering that in America, white lives have always mattered.
Kanye's justification for his actions is that Black Lives Matter is a scam. It was previously reported that the founder of BLM used $6m of donations to buy a mansion in an expensive predominately white area. From the information I have seen about the organisation, I do believe it was a scam and they used the death of black people for profit. Family members of Breonna Taylor and Tamir Rice had stated that they received no help from BLM despite the faces of their dead loved ones being used by the organisation. However, I do agree with the statement itself 'Black Lives Matter' because they do, and I did attend the George Floyd BLM protest in London in 2020 which was mainly peaceful.
Kanye West has said in an instagram post that his "T-shirt took all the attention". This is exactly what he wanted. It was Paris Fashion week and he was doing a show for his Yeezy brand. I don't think anyone can fully understand the mind of Kanye West. We are used to Kanye having outbursts and saying or doing things that don't make sense to the average person. I believe that the death of his mother, Donda is what caused his mental health issues and he has never been the same since.
I am a fan of Candace Owens and I do agree with a lot of things she says and she has opened my eyes to black conservatism. At the same time there are some things she says that I do wholeheartedly disagree with. She recently done a podcast called “White Lives Matter”, I watched it on YouTube to see her justification as to why her and Kanye wore the WLM T-Shirt. In this Podcast episode she highlighted the hypocrisy of "Black Lives Matter" within the Black American community. She started off by discussing the high abortion rate within the black American community and how in New York more black babies were aborted than were born. She also talked about black criminality and that black men make up about 7% of the American population but 40% of all homicides. Further, black people kill other black people at exponentially high rates and there is no outrage at all about that and instead it is glorified in music. She highlighted that in 2020 there were only about 9 black people killed by Police. If these figures are accurate, she has a point as abortions and black on black murders are bigger killers in the black communities which people don't seem as bothered about. Others will argue that when black men commit murder they are dealt with by the Law whereas police officers are more likely to get away with killing black victims, which is also true. Candace also raised that obesity is the number 1 killer in America and that black women have the highest rate of obesity than any other group at 56.9%. She also talked about father absence and the education system.
After watching her video I agree with what she had said. These are issues in the black American community that needs to be addressed and dealt with if people genuinely do care about black lives. Candace has alway spoken out against the negative side of black American culture, and holds black people accountable. There are a lot of black people that dislike her, but if you listen to her carefully a lot of what she says makes sense as she comes from a place of looking at facts and statistics as oppose to talking out of emotion. I personally believe that, if black lives matter then ALL black lives should matter, not just when a white Police officer kills a black person.