While many shy away from celebrity divorce drama, sometimes these cases reflect interpersonal dynamics that play out in other divorces. The Kim and Kanye divorce is just such an example. Trevor Noah’s commentary is particularly insightful on how Kanye’s behavior and Kim’s response reflect gendered power and control dynamics that are common in separating couples. It is worth watching. He says, “I understand that some people may not feel sorry for Kim because she’s a Kardashian, because she’s rich and famous, but what she’s going through is terrifying and shines a light on what so many women are going through when they choose to leave…. What we're seeing is one of the richest, most powerful women in the world, unable to get her ex to stop harassing her.”
Trevor Noah, (whose book, Born A Crime, details how the domestic violence he saw perpetrated against his mother impacted him) shares in this monologue how often people told his mom she was overreacting and told her to calm down. Describing scenarios in which he and his mother went to report the abuse, she was asked, “Oh, did you talk back?” or “But what did you say to him?”
Trevor Noah’s mother was shot in the head by her intimate partner. “I’m not saying that Kanye is going to do that, or that he is a bad guy but we have to ask ourselves as a society, do we wish to standby and watch a car crash when we thought we saw it coming, or do we want to say, hey, let’s slow down… and if nothing happens, the worst thing is that we all had our hazards on and looked like idiots. I’m fine with saying I was an idiot, nothing happened. I would rather have that than saying man, I wish we didn’t think this whole thing wasn’t worth looking at.”
Kanye’s posts in response to Trevor Noah resulted in Instagram temporarily suspending Kanye’s account for violating hate speech and bullying rules. It was also recently announced that West will no longer be performing at the Grammy Awards due to “concerning online behavior.”
In January 2021, Kim filed for divorce from Kanye. As their divorce proceedings were coming to an end earlier this year, Kanye began to make increasingly hostile public statements regarding Kim and her new boyfriend. Among Kanye’s concerning behavior, Kanye included a Pete Davidson look-alike being kidnapped and decapitated in claymation for his most recent music video “Eazy.”
See the original clip here: The Kim-Kanye-Pete Controversy | The Daily Show
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