What Kanye Has in Common With Trump. And Martin Luther King.

What Kanye has in common with Trump. And Martin Luther King.

- Rembert Browne

“Did I ever tell you that Gloria knew Donda?” Over Thanksgiving break in 2013, my mother casually said this in her kitchen in Atlanta, not even pausing while making breakfast. I’d been writing about Kanye West for years, but somehow on this morning, this fact about his late mother, Donda, popped into her head.

I needed to know everything. Every single thing. And so she told me. Gloria is one of my mother’s oldest and best friends, and in the ’70s, all three women were professors in Atlanta, Gloria and Donda in the same department at historically black Morris Brown College. Gloria attended little Kanye’s birthday parties and stayed close with the Wests even after they moved to Chicago, when Donda divorced Kanye’s father, the former Black Panther and pioneering black photojournalist Ray West. When the Wests would return, they would stay with Gloria, and vice versa when Gloria would go to Chicago.

After Kanye made his legendary “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” comment following Katrina, Gloria got a call from Donda. She told Gloria that she knew Kanye was going to get a lot of flak for it. Then she said, “What people don’t understand is that Kanye is the Martin Luther King of his generation.”

That was the end of the story, and my mom was now doing dishes, as if she hadn’t just dropped a bomb. Many of my own assumptions had just been verified—that Kanye was raised to believe that his destiny was not just that of a world-renowned black man but the saint of his time, and possibly even a martyr. This isn’t how the majority of the world has seen him, however, preferring the word