Kanye West has been suspended from Instagram for 24 hours, after he used a racial slur to describe the TV presenter Trevor Noah.
A spokesperson for Instagram’s parent company Meta told TMZ and HuffPost that the suspension was due to West’s violation of the company’s policy on hate speech, bullying and harassment.
Noah criticized West while presenting The Daily Show, saying of West’s many recent posts about ex-wife Kim Kardashian: “What she’s going through is horrifying to watch…what we’re seeing is one of the most powerful and richest women in the world, unable to get her ex to stop. About texting, stop stalking her, stop harassing her.”
West responded by rewriting Kumbaya’s words to “koon baya my lord,” a perversion of a word some use to describe a black person who rejects or undermines his race.
Noah replied to the post, saying:
You are an indelible part of my life, my dear. That’s why it breaks my heart to see you like this. I don’t care if you support Trump and I don’t care if you roast a house. But I care when I see you on a path perilously close to danger and pain…Never forget, the biggest trick racists played on black people was teaching us to strip each other of our blackness whenever we disagreed. It deceives us into dividing ourselves into fragments so that we may never unite in a strong rod.
Kardashian filed for divorce in January 2021, and a US court announced that she was legally single earlier this month. West lamented the split on his 2021 album Donda and in a recent poem titled Divorce. He has also repeatedly mocked Kardashian’s friend, comedian, and actor, Pete Davidson, including in a music video where a clay character beheaded model Davidson. After criticizing the video, West defended it as a creative expression, saying, “Art is not a proxy for any disease or harm.”
West also posted screenshots of a conversation with Kardashian in which she said he was “creating a dangerous and scary environment” and worried: “Someone is going to hurt Pete and it’s all your fault.” West later apologized for posting the screenshots and accompanying messages, saying, “I know sharing screenshots was annoying and it became a harassment of Kim. I take responsibility,” but has since continued to publicly criticize Kardashian and Davidson.
After West criticized her paternity, Kardashian wrote in February: “Divorce is hard enough on our kids and Kanye’s obsession with trying to control and manipulate our situation negatively and overtly causes more pain for everyone. From the start, I wanted nothing more than a healthy, supportive parenting relationship because that’s the best.” To our children and it saddens me that Kanye continues to make it impossible every step of the way.”
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