Kanye West is a man who speaks his mind. Sometimes — like when he tweeted to proclaim “BILL COSBY INNOCENT !!!!!!!!!!” or to defend lyrics referring to women as ‘bitches’ — he really shouldn’t have. But in 2005, Ye really hit the nail on the head when he used an MTV appearance to call out the homophobia, both vicious and casual, that has long infected the hip-hop canon.
“Hip-hop really is about… it was about fighting for your rights, at the beginning; about speaking your mind and about breaking down barriers. But everybody in hip-hip discriminates against gay people!” Yeezy tells the MTV host Sway Calloway. He describes how people at high school would call him homophobic slurs because his walk was different, and it made him distance himself from those characteristics, and become homophobic himself. When he found out his cousin was gay, he explains, he started to realize how discriminatory those views are.
“I wanted to just come on TV and tell my rappers, tell my friends, like, ‘yo, stop if fam.’ Seriously, that’s really discrimination,” he says. “To me that’s exactly what they used to do to black people. I’m just trying to tell people: ‘just stop all that’.” Hip-hop’s homophobia might not be as overt today as it once was, but there are still a huge number of artists who should listen to Kanye’s essential anti-discrimination PSA. Check it out below.
Read: Why we need to fight homophobia in the modeling industry.
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Text Charlotte Gush