Daily Beast Injects Race into West-Swift Incident

Why am I not surprised?

Choire Sicha has an article about the Kanye West VMA incident last night, and of course he injects race into it. Somebody had to. Oh, not into the incident itself. But into the reaction to it. Give me a break.

Before I get to that, though, I want to compliment Beyonce for her reaction to this whole thing, which I wasn't aware of until this morning (I wasn't watching the VMAs). She won video of the year (see, Kanye? You were just impatient!) and graciously asked Taylor Swift to come back up and have her unblemished shot in the spotlight. Good for you, Beyonce.


Anyway, back to the idiotic statement by Sicha.

Now, I'm not arguing with Sicha's comments about how badly the MTV people handled the situation, ushering Swift off the stage even though West said he would allow her to finish her speech. Most likely, Swift was too shocked to even remember her acceptance speech and it was a blessing that they led her off the stage. But I didn't see it, so it's also very possible that it was botched on the part of MTV.

But then he says this:

"I won't go so far as to suggest that everyone was flipped out that this angelic little white girl (and she is super-cute) was accosted by a probably drunk (West was, again according to MTVNews.com, “photographed holding a bottle of Hennessey on VMA red carpet.”)—and definitely crazy—older black man. I'll keep that thought to myself, but I'll keep thinking it."

What a load of bull. Kanye West has proven time and time again that he's an asshole. Because he proves it again and people get on his case about it, they're racists? No, Mr. Sicha. We're asshole-ists! We're prejudiced against assholes. White or Black (I'm also anti-Eminem for the most part, to name just one white asshole I'm against).

Sicha makes a few good points in his article, and others that I might very well agree with if I had actually watched the show (he's right that Perez Hilton is an extreme hypocrite to make any kind of comment on this incident, for instance). But seeing a racial element to the reaction to West's boorishness? That goes beyond the pale.

West's an asshole who relishes creating controversy by doing stuff like this. There's nothing racial about that.