Featured Image Credit: Candace Owens/Twitter. Ian Connor/Twitter.
Topics: US News, Kanye West, News, Racism
Rachel Lang
Topics: US News, Kanye West, News, Racism
Kanye West has seemingly handed out his White Lives Matter t-shirts for free in Los Angeles' poverty-stricken neighbourhood Skid Row.
A video uploaded to Twitter by a member of West's posse shows people giving away the white t-shirts to people on the streets.
In the viral clip, which has been viewed more than 44,000 times, a voice can be heard saying: "Courtesy of Kanye West."
The camera pans to show a white van loaded with boxes, presumably chock-a-block with the shirts.
As the camera continues to pan, a car passes and a man can be clearly seen grinning and holding one of the shirts, which appears to have 'White Lives Matter' emblazoned across the back.
Advert
The phrase 'White Lives Matter' burst on to the scene in 2015 as a white supremacist response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
An image was shared with the same tweet that shows a woman holding up a white shirt with the face of the former head of the Catholic Church Pope John Paul II printed across it.
The t-shirts seen in the videos and photos of the handout event match the description of the White Lives Matter shirts that were unveiled at Paris Fashion Week as a part of West's Yeezy fashion line.
Since the Paris fashion show on October 3, the 45-year-old rapper has been dogged by several scandals of his own design.
He lashed out at Kris Jenner and the Kardashian clan, claimed George Floyd died by drug overdose and not by asphyxiation, agreed to buy a right-wing social media network, and got himself dumped from Instagram and Twitter for anti-semitic comments.
It seems the shirts were being handed out for free in the wake of West's comments about Jewish people and his alleged fallout with American Apparel founder Dov Charney, who is Jewish, Rolling Stone reports.
According to the music magazine, Charney refused to release the shirts his company manufactured after West declared he was about to go 'death con three' on 'Jewish people'.
A source told Rolling Stone that the handout on Skid Row will not be an isolated event.
The source close to the rock and roll magazine claimed there could be more free drops of the shirts on their way.
Skid Row has the largest stable population of homelessness in the US and is also home to the Cecil Hotel, which houses 10,000 people and is the setting of the chilling true-crime docuseries which investigated the vanishing and death of a woman named Elisa Lam.