To kick off February, which is nationally regarded as Black History Month, Kanye West decided to take things in a different direction. His Black Future Month campaign has seen him emphasize how he is tired of dwelling on Black people’s history in America, and would rather focus on progress going forward.
Along with this campaign, February has been a busy month for Kanye in terms of his upcoming Donda 2 album and his upcoming Netflix three-part documentary releasing soon. As the doc titled jeen-yuhs is set to drop its first part on Feb. 16, Ye attended the debut screening yesterday (Feb. 11). At the screening, Ye gave a speech about how important community is for him during this time: “When you have people next to you that believe in you, and a community, and that the community sticks together, that’s the way that we can protect each other. Out here in Hollywood a lot of times, I got my man DaBaby right here, people try to cancel us and we all run away from each other… we not talking to each other, not communicating, and that’s why on Black Future Month we stood up and said, ‘We got stand next to each other and we ain’t gonna let each other go when someone brings up one mistake that someone did.’”
While accompanied by one of his favorite young rappers DaBaby, West continued discussing how invested he is in the future of Black Americans: “When y’all see me doing certain things that y’all wouldn’t expect us to do, and y’all want me to step back and be a house***a, that’s not my position. My position is to make what y’all might think are mistakes in public, so I can show you that that ain’t no red line, that ain’t no real wall. That’s just a smokescreen, and it’s for us to take this. We on lables we don’t own, play for basketball teams we don’t own. The time is now. I got offered $100 million by Larry Jackson to put ‘Donda’ on Apple, but I ain’t never got a meeting with Tim Cook. So it ain’t about the money, it’s about our power and out respect collectively. So I be saying stuff that people try to remind me in Black History Month that people got killed for. But this is Black Future Month.”
With as much as Kanye has going on in February, he seems as motivated as ever to achieve his goals. Check out his inspired speech below.