Kanye made me love being Black. That's why I can't vote for him

“So, you voting Kanye 2020?” an online friend messaged me several days ago, his question followed immediately by a smiley emoji.

“Yeah, sure,” I typed back, with a smile larger than my keyboard itself. This was before West made a Twitter announcement officially throwing his hat into the ring for the November election. It turns out my friend's joke wasn't a joke after all.

I graduated high school the year West’s debut album “The College Dropout” not only changed what we listened to on the radio (Black kids suddenly gained permission to listen to classical and punk!), he redefined what being Black could and should be. Kanye singlehandedly made me fall in love with my skin for the very first time. Not Wesley. Not Grace Jones. Not Eddie Murphy.

My friends went from wearing FUBU to polo, from baggy to khaki, within the same week that the album dropped. We wore tiny backpacks with Scooby Doo on them. Watches too shiny to point directly at the sun. Some of us even added wristbands and clocks bigger than Flava Flav’s to the new ensemble.

I was treated differently, a little more equally. Sure, things eventually went back to normal — the police harassment, the bigotry, the “fitting the profile” you always hear about — but for that brief snapshot of my Black life, I was born anew, like a dark phoenix rising in a pair of Hilfiger’s and Calvin Klein underwear.

For a decade and a half, Kanye’s music has been criticized by people who have never listened to it. And he’s always been difficult to stomach. Take his his ad-lib reaction to George Bush’s poor response to Hurricane Katrina during NBC’s “A Concert For Hurricane Relief.” The accusation that “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” accompanied by Mike Meyers’ total show of disbelief before the camera switched to an equally shocked Chris Tucker? I wish I could have pulled out a bucket of popcorn. This was my fellow Chicagoan, standing up for the people of New Orleans, a place I’d only heard about, for people who looked like me that I’d never cared about, until that broadcast, until Kanye West.

Then there was the debacle back in 2009. The Video Music Awards. The same VMAs he showed up to with a bottle of Hennessy, like, “Yeah, I’m in here!” We all remember his epic outburst, wherein he rudely and very loudly stole Taylor Swift’s microphone with an “I’mma let you finish” rant because he felt that Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” should have beat out Swift’s “You Belong With Me” for Best Female Artist. I agreed with him. Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, Swift fans have just called for her to run for president too — with Selena Gomez as her VP.

All of this only deepened my appreciation of the man.

And truth be told, I listen to Kanye at least two or three times a day. I honestly can’t help myself. Several of his albums are already stored safely on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, which is no small trick. And for very good reason. His song “Crack Music” talks about the crack epidemic: “Crack raised the murder rate in DC and Maryland/ We invested in that/ It’s like we got Merrill Lynched/ And we been hanging from the same tree ever since.” How do you go from that to being a mouthpiece for Donald Trump, the same man who was sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination? Or take “Power” off his magnum opus “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” West announces in that song: “The system broken/ The schools closed/ The prisons open,” a system affecting Black neighborhoods, a system I’ve heard way too many allegedly intelligent adults claim doesn’t exist.

All that said, it would be a lie to say the African-American community, as a whole, hasn’t had much reason to fall out of love with Kanye West. From his support of all things MAGA, to his comments about 400 years of slavery being a choice (which made him sound a lot like Ben Carson), his choices the past few years have come to be seen as a betrayal to almost his entire fan base.

It is because of all of this that I can say it’s a good thing Ye hasn’t actually taken any steps toward starting a campaign (so far). West presumably wants us to forget his past four years of Trump support by saying it was a fake-out to help the Black community. But the damage is done, and I’m not buying that line. This isn’t the same man whose early tunes inspired me to love my skin.

Times have changed, and so has Kanye. There’s nothing that’ll ever keep me from loving his music, his effect on culture, or his fashion.

There is just this one thing: I can't vote for Kanye because I love the love for myself he gave me.