On Superbowl Sunday, Kanye West posted on Instagram. A lot.
Many of the photos centered around Pete Davidson, his ex-wife Kim Kardashian’s new boyfriend. The captions were written entirely in all caps, and the statements were so erratic that Kanye dedicated an entire set of posts to clarifying that his account was not hacked.
Among the slew of poorly-cropped photos was an image of a text message from Pete. It seemed to say something along the lines of “I’d never get in the way of your children . . . How you guys go about raising your kids is your business and not mine. I do hope one day I can meet them and we can all be friends.” Kanye responds to this message in the caption, stating “NO YOU WILL NEVER MEET MY CHILDREN.” Four hours after it was posted, the photo had over 1,400,000 likes, and the internet was going wild.
To many people, this online spectacle may have seemed frivolous and undeserving of attention. However, the fact is that Kanye West holds an immense amount of public sway, and the manner in which society responds to him is often telling–in other words, it reveals trends that we might not otherwise notice. In many cases, the point is not really about people like Kanye; it’s more about how we react to them. And for many years, the public’s response to his behavior has been markedly disturbing.
Kanye is currently 44 years old, and he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2016. Last Sunday is not the first time that he has spoken out against ex-wife Kim Kardashian since she filed for divorce, as exemplified by his previous comments on twitter (posts that follow his recent capslock trend). This is also not the first time in his life that Kanye has done something decidedly erratic–remember when he ran for president in 2020? Or when he admitted to the public that he and his wife had considered aborting their daughter North? He has also spoken openly about his experience with bipolar disorder, through songs that many of us are familiar with. I think of driving to work during the summer of 2019, streaming “Yikes” in my car and listening to him say “That’s my bipolar sh*t / . . . That’s my superpower, / . . . I’m a / superhero! I’m a superhero! / Ahhh!”
To quote Susannah Cahalan from the New York Post, “it’s not easy to tell where Kanye West the showman ends and Kanye West the troubled man begins.” It is widely known that he has opted out of taking medication, as his ex-wife Kim has openly admitted when discussing his situation to the public. He has acted out in ways that have explicitly aggravated his family, and vocalized statements that will likely haunt his children the moment they are old enough to comprehend them.
For many years, the public’s response to Kanye’s behavior has been to laugh.
Sunday was no exception, as people contorted his posts into memes and goaded him on in the comments under the photos. He has since removed them, but one does not have to go far on apps such as TikTok to find a slew of videos making light of the situation. One user posted a video with the text “Kanye posting verification so Instagram doesn’t remove his account is THE pop culture moment,” to which a user commented “Dude is going fully manic. It’s hella meme worthy but he’s legit struggling,” and another said “It’s not even a manic episode just let the man do what he wants, it’s his thing.” Comments such as this exemplify the ways that Kanye’s weekend tirade served as a primary source of entertainment for many over the weekend–in addition to the ways that some people brushed his behavior off as normal.
I’ll be honest, I too was initially amused on Sunday when I first read the posts. Perhaps one of the most famous captions literally included the statement “I DIDNT WAKE UP AND FIGHT FOR MY FAMILY TO TREND OVER THE SUPER BOWL [sic] BUT IT HAPPENED . . . I WISH MY WIFE WAS WITH ME AND OUR CHILDREN SITTING AT THE 50 YARD LINE @kimkardashian ALWAYS REMEMBER WEST WAS YOUR BIGGEST W.” This was an incredulous, striking gesture that did initially seem comical. But several hours after the posts surfaced, I sobered up when I came across an important point.
To paraphrase a statement by one critical viewer: If the roles were reversed and Kim Kardashian was humiliating her family, making bizarre accusations, and writing manic sentences in all-caps, we would make a petition for her mother, Kris Jenner, to put her in a mental facility and demand that she lose full custody of her kids. But many of us are still refusing to hold men accountable.
In other words, would we tolerate this behavior from the mother of four small children? Would we allow her to walk around perpetuating this rhetoric and exploiting her private family business for the world to see? Would we laugh instead of growing concerned and calling for someone else to take custody of her children? Why is it acceptable for a father to do this and then take his children to a football game without tangible repercussions?
This example serves as a reminder of a critical mental exercise: reversing everything. This was a helpful endeavor when, for instance, Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pu**y” comment surfaced in 2016. How far would a female candidate have gotten in a presidential election if she had bragged about grabbing male appendages in secret? Would she still have a realistic chance? As disgusted as many Americans were in light of this comment, it can be difficult to sense our underlying prejudices until we flip the situation around and consider our instinctual reaction–and that includes all of us, across party lines, racial groups, cultural associations, and genders. Once again, it proves especially critical with this frenzy of Kanye posts over the weekend.
Furthermore, in light of this weekend’s events, it remains vital to consider what we accept as public entertainment. Cahalan makes a fantastic point when she asks, “If we were told that Kanye’s behavior came as a result of untreated early-onset dementia, would any of us still laugh?” Perhaps it’s time to consider what it says about our culture when we have thousands of people enabling and encouraging the manifestation of an untreated, well-known psychological disorder.
This weekend raised a multitude of questions about accountability, double standards, and the types of behavior that we tolerate and uplift as a society. As we process these concepts, it becomes more crucial than ever to evaluate our instinctual response to public manifestations of mental illness. On the bright side, it seems that after the haze of this weekend, many of us are starting to wake up.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.