Rap Superstar Kanye West described former President Barack Obama as the “opioids” of the black community, during an interview with TMZ’s Harvey Levin on Tuesday.
“Obama was our opioids. It made us feel like everything was good,” he said during the interview.
Kanye West said Obama was held in such a high regard that it alienated himself from the lower class.
“The class war is one of the reasons why Trump won, because Obama was so high class that it stopped speaking to the middle and the lower class,” he said. “He’s so classy, and to break the class system, we have to start by loving ourselves.”
West said that he felt that Hollywood and the media had created a perception that black men had to be perfect, just like Obama, to be successful.
“This perfect idea of a superhero with Obama, or Michael Jordan — I want to show people that it is ok to screw up, and you still can make it through things,” he said.
West said that his friends had been texting and emailing him repeatedly about the things that Trump had done, but he reminded them that Obama had done some of the same things.
“Black people have a tendency to focus and march when a white person kills a black person or wears a hat, but when it’s 700 kids being killed in Chicago it’s O.K. … There’s been more focus and more marches about whites killing blacks than kids in Chicago killing each other,” he said.
West admitted that he got addicted to opioids after he got liposuction plastic surgery and they gave him opioid painkillers as part of his recovery.