Chance The Rapper issues apology after Trump thanks him on Twitter
The President took one of Chance’s ambiguous tweets as implicit support.
On Friday morning, President Donald Trump has thanked Kanye West for "a great service to the black community" in the form of his pro-Trump tweets, and expressed gratitude to Chance The Rapper as well, presumably for his recent posting "Black people don't have to be democrats." Soon after, Chance The Rapper tweeted an apology, clarifying that he does not support Trump. "I'd never support anyone who has made a career out of hatred, racism and discrimination," he wrote.
Chance's "democrats" tweet was approvingly reposted by Donald Trump Jr. and Candace Owens, who took it as an endorsement of right-wing politics. However, in his apology Chance described the tweet as ill-timed and reflected "a personal issue with the fact that Chicago has had generations of democratic officials with no investment or regard for black schools, neighborhood[s] or black lives."
Acknowledging that his defence of Kanye appeared to come at the expense of "my brothers and sisters in the movement," Chance promised to atone through future, undetermined actions. "So let my apology be seen in my future works, and let me make up for my poorly timed comments with immediate action and advocacy for those who need it most."
Prior to the "democrats" tweet, Chance expressed a similar sentiment in a 2015 interview with Complex:
I try to explain to people a lot: There is no singular black experience or black opinion or black thought. We are united in a lot of experiences. Because I’m a black man, the life that I live is a part of the black experience, but it’s not something I can just pass off as the ultimate.
He also made a point about using the platform of celebrity responsibly, which I think very much applies to Kanye's situation right now:
I think it’s important for me to be qualified to have an opinion on it, and it be informed, but I don’t necessarily think using my platform is always the right thing. It’s more important for [people] to have information. I don’t necessarily always have information. If they’re getting it directly from an uninformed source, or they’re getting it from a source that they don’t really have a filter on in terms of how they take it in, it kind of becomes more propaganda.
It's unlikely that Chance and the MAGA crowd would have shared many priorities, though – Chance endorsed Hillary Clinton, campaigned against a $95 million police academy in Chicago, and has previously called Trump's presidency "a symptom" of "division [and] racism in this country."
Thumbnail photo by Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for Take-Two Interactive