Kanye West Takes Back ‘Ignorant Compliment’
Image by Getty Images
Kanye West told a Chicago radio station that he wants to take back the “ignorant compliment” he made about Jews.
The rapper referred to a comment he made last month during an interview on the New York City radio station WWPR-FM. In defending President Obama’s difficulty in passing his policies, West said, “Black people don’t have the same level of connections as Jewish people.”
“I thought that I was giving a compliment, but it came off more ignorant,” West said last week in an interview with the Chicago radio station B96. “When I said this comment about Jews having money, and blacks not having money, I think it was, like, a ‘ignorant compliment.’
“I don’t know how being told that you have money is, like, an insult,” he added.
The original comments had raised the ire of the Anti-Defamation League, while Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan defended West and said he should not apologize.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
