It was an incredible turn of events for the artist formerly known as Kanye West, whose net worth shrunk this week due to his intentional outpouring of antisemitic rhetoric as well as spreading a debunked right-wing conspiracy theory about Floyd’s death.
According to the Consequence of Sound, an entertainment news website, the rapper known simply as Ye apologized on Friday night while speaking to celebrity photographers.
“When I see that video as a Black person, it hurts my feelings,” West said. “And I know that police do attack [sic] and that America is generally racist. And I understand that when we got to say, Black Lives Matter, the idea of it made us feel good together as a people. Now, afterward, there were some things where the money went in order to push us to the Democratic vote.”
In stunningly tone-deaf fashion, he went on to suggest that Adidas ending his contract had the same effect as Derek Chauvin using his knee to apply lethal pressure to George Floyd’s neck.
“So when I questioned the death of George Floyd, it hurt my people,” West continued. “I want to apologize. Because God has shown me what Adidas is doing, by what the media is doing, I know what it feels like to have a knee on my neck right now. So thank you God for humbling me and letting me know how it really felt. Because how could the richest Black men ever be humbled other than to be made to not be a billionaire in front of every one of a comment.”
That wasn’t the first time he apologized for his comments, but it was the first time he specifically apologized for the George Floyd lies.
Kanye issued a religiously charged apology this week to “the Jewish people that I hurt.”
However, neither Floyd nor the anti-Black sentiments from his “white lives matter” shirts controversy were mentioned in the apology, which led directly to him becoming a defiant fountain of antisemitism.
That is, until Adidas, along with a number of other brands, severed ties with Ye, reducing his net worth from more than $2 billion to around $400 million, according to estimates.