Kanye West‘s pro-Trump crusade continued at the offices of TMZ this Tuesday, where he dropped by to profess his love for President Trump and to inform everyone that slavery was a “choice.” But his words prompted TMZ writer Van Lathan to confront the rapper, leading to a tense scene that was captured on video.
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — that sounds like a choice,” West said during an interview with TMZ’s Harvey Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere.
“Like, you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all?” West continued. “It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word ‘prison’ because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. It’s like slavery, Holocaust. Holocaust, Jews. Slavery is blacks. So, prison is something that unites us as one race. Blacks and whites being one race. We’re the human race.”
Kanye with the worst take yet
"You hear about slavery for 400 years. 400 years?! That sounds like a choice." pic.twitter.com/jJwtByDuyH
— alazar (@zarzarbinkss) May 1, 2018
In one clip from the interview, Kanye turns to the entire TMZ newsroom and asks, “Do you feel that I’m being free and I’m thinking free?”
That question prompted Lathan to chime in.
“I actually don’t think you’re thinking anything,” Lathan quipped. “I think what you’re doing right now is actually the absence of thought and the reason why I feel like that is because, Kanye, you’re entitled to your opinion.”
“You’re entitled to believe whatever you want, but there is fact and real world, real life consequence behind everything you just said,” he continued. “And while you’re making music and being an artist and living the life that you’ve earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives. We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from the 400 years of slavery that you said for our people was a choice.”
“I am unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something, to me, that is not real.”
Watch the clip below via TMZ:
Featured image via screen grab
