OPINION: I never thought of Kanye West as a terrible father until his recent spate of posts and antics, which do nothing but make life harder for his kids.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
Every so often, I forget that Kanye West (Ye) has spent most of his non-music-related interactions with the public since 2018, ensuring that we all know that he is pretty much a crappy human being. He believes that his ability to say a thing or do a thing is more important than who is impacted by it. He is not alone in that, for the record, and nobody likes being censored. But at this point, Ye’s only north star seems to be chaos, spectacle and shock value, which is a shame considering that he’s a parent of four children, one of whom seems to want to emulate him and is old enough to see and understand the real world consequences of his actions.
He wasn’t always like that. In 2005, when he went off script at the Hurricane Katrina benefit concert proclaiming that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” Ye’s penchant for saying whatever popped into his mind was in service to the people who needed help and him using his considerable platform to say the quiet part out loud. 2025 Ye, on the other hand, used his considerable X platform to seek freedom for Sean “Diddy” Combs, speak positively about Hitler, refer to himself as a Nazi, denigrate Jewish people, and treat his wife, Bianca Censori, as his property. Oh, he also reminded everybody that he does indeed believe that slavery was a choice, no matter how Van Lathan corrected him back in 2018 at the offices of TMZ.
To say that Ye is trash is too easy. He is performatively controversial at this point; the why of it all is unclear. That he would go on a rampage on his now-deleted X account to cape for terrible human beings is textbook Kanye. He is an ardent Trump supporter but we’ve known that since 2018. He seems to think that his value to humanity surpasses that of nearly everybody but a few scant rich people or famous people, which is odd since I would argue that Ye has been musically irrelevant for at least the last five years, and if not for his shoes, he’s been fashionably irrelevant even longer than that. His musical genius has often been the thing that granted him enough grace to hope that we’d get a return of the Kanye who felt like part of the community, the one referenced in the skit, “I Love Kanye” from 2016’s “The Life of Pablo.”
To the greater world and pop cultural community, Kanye has started to veer head-on into caricature, but I assume that to his kids, he’s not just Kanye or Dad, but Superman, a role that many fathers play for their kids, even at our lowest moments. I have four kids, and even when the world seems to be intent on breaking me down, showing up for my kids, who think I’m stronger than everybody else and smarter than everybody else, is a narrative costume that I’m happy to wear. That’s why I’d never do anything to make life difficult for my kids. While I, of course, have to live my life, I’m not just living it for me anymore; I have to consider what the world looks like for my children and whether or not my choices make it worse for them. My choices reflect outcomes that I hope benefit my kids — I might not always get it right, but my intentions are always pure. The thing is, I’m not famous; if I do or say something crazy or untoward in a public space, the chances that my kids will face some consequences for it are nil. Even my oldest, who is now 16, is unlikely to bear the responsibility for my misdeeds.
Kanye West is one of the most famous people on the planet. To be that famous and that inhumane, on purpose, for no other reason than because he can, is one of the most parentally irresponsible things I’ve ever seen in my life. Kanye is a terrible father. You can’t be a good one if you use your huge megaphone to praise Hitler, while downing Jewish people. You can’t be a good father if you decide to use your website to sell items promoting Nazis, selling t-shirts with swastikas on them…because you can (or could; his site was taken down and, as of this writing, is non-operational). Or supporting Puffy by selling “Sean John” shirts to help financially support a man we saw beat Cassie on camera right after he swore that her lawsuit was frivolous. The last time I was even on the site, he still had “White Lives Matter” shirts available for sale. Why, Kanye? Why?
Good parents don’t do stuff that makes it hard for their kids to attend school or show up anywhere. North West, his oldest child, who we last saw on Kanye’s IG page (all the posts on his IG are gone), chopping up beats and working with her on her album, clearly loves her dad. The tenderness exhibited there was moving; Kanye was a proud father of his daughter, who seemed to be following in his footsteps. He even alleged that working with her made him fall in love with music again. Kanye brought us into the world of his and his daughter’s relationship, and as a father to a daughter, it warmed my heart. Some part of me even assumed (stupidly) that maybe, because of his kids, he was considering how and what he presented in public. Silly of me. Now if he shows up for her somewhere, who knows what people might say to him, or worse, her, because of him. People like Kanye are who you protect your kids from, not leave with for unsupervised weekends.
Shortly after that, Kanye took to his X account and went full rager. Not only that, he showed up on the Grammys red carpet with his wife wearing…nothing. Sure, it was a sheer piece from some collection of his — the black version was available on his site — but, like, for what purpose other than he could show up and demand attention would he think it’s cool to treat his wife like an art project to get his unimaginative ideas off? I can’t understand a parent who values self above his kids, and that is exactly what has been on display. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I can’t imagine what it must be like for Kim to have to run damage control because of Kanye and his decisions to do what he wants without regard for any impact on their kids.
I’m sure his kids love him; our kids often see the best versions of us even when we don’t show up that way for them. They give us grace and mercy, and it seems like Kanye requires both. I don’t know what Kanye is like behind closed doors with his family, and I hope it’s all games of Black Uno and rich people versions of family game nights and movie nights and all the regular stuff parents do with their kids. Maybe it is. But what he shows the rest of us publicly in spaces where his kids interact within the world his kids have to live in is unconscionable. I hope at home he’s all love, patience, and joy because the public-facing Ye is absolutely, 100% not a good parent.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
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