At long last, Kanye West has answered the question that left him speechless on Jimmy Kimmel Live!
During an interview with Chicago’s 107.5 WGCI radio, West was given an opportunity to answer this question posed by Jimmy Kimmel earlier this month: “You so famously and so powerfully said ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people.’ It makes me wonder, what makes you think that Donald Trump does?”
“I feel that [Trump] cares about the way black people feel about him, and he would like for black people to like him like they did when he was cool in the rap songs and all this,” West said. But as he continued, he began to speculate about Trump’s intentions, giving the president the benefit of the doubt without much evidence.
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“He will do the things that are necessary to make that happen because he’s got an ego like all the rest of us, and he wants to be the greatest president, and he knows that he can’t be the greatest president without the acceptance of the black community,” West added. “So it’s something he's gonna work towards, but we’re gonna have to speak to him.”
Following the Kimmel appearance, West pushed back against the idea that he had been “stumped” by the question, tweeting, “I’m reading that I was stumped by a question. Let me clarify the click bait. I wasn’t stumped. I wasn’t given a chance to answer the question.” He added, “The question was so important I took time to think. And then I was hit with the let’s go to commercial break. That interview showed strong personalities with different opinions having a civil conversation.”
However, during a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Kimmel said he felt West’s silence “answered the question,” adding, “I also know that if Kanye wanted to continue on a subject then he is not shy about continuing on that subject.”
“Kanye is kind of in a perpetual state of being interviewed and he shares his thoughts constantly. So the idea that he needed to come up with the answer right there on the spot isn’t necessarily something I agree with,” Kimmel said of his decision to cut to commercial in that moment. “I think it’s a question that I hope he will answer eventually. But to force an answer out of somebody isn’t necessarily the way to go.”
In the same radio interview on Wednesday, West offered up an emotional apology for his comments to TMZ suggesting that slavery was “choice.”
“I wanna say to everyone listening right now—I have never really approached or addressed the slavery comment fully,” West said. “And it’s not something for me to overly intellectualize. This is something about the fact that it hurt people’s feelings and the way that I presented that piece of information. I could present in a way more calm way, but I was ramped up. And I apologize. That happens sometimes when people are—I’m not blaming mental health, but I’m explaining mental health.”
“I don’t know if I properly apologized for how the slavery comment made people feel,” he continued. “I’m sorry for the one-two effect of the MAGA hat into the slave comment, and I’m sorry for people that felt let down by that moment. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk to you about the way I was thinking and what I was going through.”
