Kanye West, Black Men’s Choices, The Limits Of Forgiveness
On Kanye West, Black Men’s Choices, And The Limits Of Forgiveness
Last week, as many had predicted over the past few years, Kanye West woke up one morning and decided to apologize.
Not necessarily in the half-hearted, PR-cleansed way we’ve grown accustomed to from public figures who torch their reputations with some moral dereliction or another and then attempt to rebuild them with carefully selected language, sympathetic lighting, and a nodding Gayle King. This apology was longer. Slower. More deliberate. He spoke about his bipolar disorder. About the car accident years ago that he says caused a brain injury that altered his personality. About the ways his mind fractured and hardened and caused his already existing eccentricities to manifest themselves in spectacular ways.
He didn’t explicitly ask for forgiveness. I think he knows he’s too far gone for that in this moment. But he made it clear he wanted the chance to prove that he could be better. In the same way your drug addict cousin knows they won’t be invited inside the house, but at least hopes to be able to have someone let them sit on the porch or bring them out a plate.
And I believe him.
Or at least, I want to. I’m trying to.
There was a time when I was a real Kanye fan.
I was in Chicago in that golden era from 2001 to 2004 when he took over the world. We’re about the same age. We knew a lot of the same people. That meant I wasn’t just a casual listener, but someone who saw himself and his own aspirations as a Black man in early adulthood in the audacity of Kanye West. The refusal to shrink to make others comfortable. The insistence that Black creativity didn’t need permission or a precedent. The way his early work felt like it was speaking directly to a generation of Black men who were tired of being told to stay in their lane, knowing that they didn’t make, nor did they want to be defined by, said lane. Kanye once represented the idea that brilliance and vulnerability could exist in the same body. That raw ambition didn’t have to come with apology.
So when he spiraled, publicly and painfully, in many ways, it felt personal. Not just disappointing, but disorienting. Watching someone you once admired unravel so spectacularly forces you to question not just them, but yourself. Was he like this the whole time? What did I miss? What did I excuse? What did I project onto him that was never really there?
To be honest, more than anything, I felt a certain degree of anger toward him. We had his back. We’d been in his corner. We didn’t just buy the albums, we bought into his contrary vision of Black masculinity within the stereotypical confines of Hip-Hop culture.
Still, when Kanye apologized last week, I felt something soften. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to believe that the words were real. That this wasn’t just another stop on the long, exhausting carousel of public implosion and conditional redemption.
I wanted to try to give him some space.
And that desire, to make room for a flawed Black man to try again, felt familiar.
Too familiar.
Because last week also marked 20 years since my brother passed.
I say “passed” to soften the rhetorical blow that I experience whenever I speak on this uncomfortable reality. The fact is, he died by suicide.
That sentence still doesn’t sit comfortably in my mouth. Even after two decades, it feels unfinished. Like there should be an asterisk. A footnote. Maybe just a deep exhale after I say it. Some additional explanation that might make it easier to accept.
But, all these years later, there isn’t one.
For 20 years, I’ve carried grief in all its forms. Anger, depression, and misplaced emotional attachments. But I’ve also carried something else that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough, especially among Black men.
I’ve carried unforgiveness.
As much as I’ve tried… and I have tried… I’ve never forgiven my brother for what he did: to himself, to our family, to me. Not fully. Not cleanly. Not in the way people assume you’re supposed to after enough time has passed.
Two decades of waking up every day and not feeling right is hard to reconcile. Especially with a ghost.
And that realization, that my capacity for forgiveness is permanently damaged, has been sitting with me heavily this week.
We often talk about forgiveness as if it’s a moral obligation. As if it’s the final stage of grief. As if healing is incomplete without it. But no one really prepares you for what it means to forgive someone who is no longer here to receive it.
You can still keep going without moving on.
No one talks about how forgiveness requires participation. How it assumes dialogue. Growth. Repair.
You can’t forgive someone with one side of the story. That’s pity.
My brother never got the chance to explain himself. And I never got the chance to tell him how much damage his absence caused. The misplaced rage. The personal confusion. The way his decision fractured the existence of people who loved him most.
When he passed, people told me to remember him for who he was, not how he left.
But those things are inseparable. They are definitive. They are existential to this story.
Just like with Kanye.
We’ll let Kanye back in. Black folks are a naturally forgiving people. When you live under constant assault for just being, it’s hard to throw folks away who are trying to survive as well.
But, eventually and slowly. With conditions, caution, and skepticism, we’ll at least let him sit on the porch. We always do. Because Black men aren’t afforded grace when they run afoul of normative expectations, especially publicly, and when they fall from such a high perch, they need to know they can always come home.
But, here’s the thing: we will never not know that this Kanye existed.
The naked appeals to anti-Blackness. The elevation and platforming of cultural adversaries. The antisemitic rants and glorification of an ideology of dangerous intolerance. The cruelty. The doubling, tripling, and quadrupling down. The refusal to be accountable when it mattered most. That version of him is now part of the permanent record. No apology erases that.
It’s definitive. It’s existential to his story.
I can mourn my brother as the man he was; the inside jokes, the laughter, the bond, the person I grew up with and spent so much time trying to be like. But there will always be a part of him I just can’t reconcile with. The part that chose to leave so suddenly and without explanation. The part that transferred whatever pain he was experiencing onto everyone else and called it an ending.
Kanye is still with us.
My brother is not.
So logically and rationally, I keep telling myself that I should be more generous with Kanye. More patient. More forgiving.
But forgiveness doesn’t operate on logic. Forgiveness is, innately, irrational.
It operates on capacity.
And mine is broken.
Black men aren’t conditioned to know how to forgive. Not really. We know how to put things away. We’re praised for endurance. We’re pushed toward silence. We’re taught how to absorb disappointment and keep it moving. But forgiveness, especially the kind that requires a greater degree of vulnerability and complex emotional honesty, is rarely modeled for us in healthy ways.
What we learn instead is selective forgiveness.
We forgive the men who abandon us or make excuses for their own absence. We forgive the men who embarrass us publicly but remain present enough to apologize later. We forgive the men whose pain is, actively or retrospectively, legible. Diagnosable. Even marketable. We forgive the men whose suffering comes with footnotes and explanations we can point to and say, See? This makes sense.
But we struggle to forgive the men whose pain is quiet. Internal. Terminal.
Simply stated, we can respect crazy. But we still haven’t grappled with mentally ill.
Suicide doesn’t offer redemption arcs. There’s no press tour. No comeback album. No Instagram Reel or TikTok from the gym getting back in shape to prove you’ve changed. There’s just absence.
And that absence leaves survivors holding questions they’ll never get answered.
I can and do talk openly about mental health. I believe deeply in the need for Black men to address it honestly, openly, and without shame to limit the stigma. I understand that my brother was likely in pain I couldn’t see. Pain he didn’t have the language, nor social permission, to express.
And still, I’m angry.
Still, I feel abandoned.
Still, I feel like forgiveness was taken from me when he made a unilateral decision that affected everyone else forever.
That’s the part we don’t like to admit as a community.
That forgiveness isn’t just rooted in empathy. It’s about access. About timing. About whether the person who caused the harm is still here to participate in the process.
Healing is a team sport.
Kanye is implicitly asking for time. For grace. For a chance to demonstrate growth.
That is a request my brother never made. Maybe he didn’t know how to. Or, maybe he didn’t think he could.
So, perhaps, the harder truth is this: my inability to forgive him has shaped how I engage with other Black men who disappoint me. Every slight or letdown. Every broken promise. Every emotional absence. Every man who opts out instead of anteing up, it all traces back to that original wound.
Too many of the Black men in my life have let me down. Some intentionally, some because they didn’t know any better.
And my brother stands out as the one I’ll never be able to reconcile with.
That doesn’t make me cruel. It makes me human. And I can live with that.
Forgiveness is often framed as a gift you give someone else. But like any other gift, the decision to extend it is yours. It’s always optional, never obligatory.
We should absolutely make space for Black men to heal. To apologize. To grow. To come back from their worst moments.
But we also need to be honest about the emotional labor that forgiveness demands of the people left behind. Those left in the wake of those selfish moments. The people who will have to carry some manner of burden around forever because of a decision they didn’t make.
We can acknowledge Kanye’s apology without rushing to absolution.
We can talk about mental health and healing without pretending it erases the harm and damage caused by its worst moments.
And we can admit, without shame, that some wounds never fully close.
Kanye may very well earn his way back into the conversation. Over time. With consistency. With humility. Or even with a track that bangs enough that our heads bob into a self-soothing nod that we acquiesce to as a personal surrender to his talent.
My brother will never get that chance.
And sitting with that reality doesn’t make me unforgiving.
It makes me honest about the limits of what I can carry.
Maybe the work isn’t forcing forgiveness where it doesn’t fit.
Maybe the work is learning how to live truthfully with what remains unresolved.
Corey Richardson is originally from Newport News, Va., and currently lives in Chicago, Ill. Ad guy by trade, Dad guy in life, and grilled meat enthusiast, Corey spends his time crafting words, cheering on beleaguered Washington DC sports franchises, and yelling obscenities at himself on golf courses. As the founder of The Instigation Department, you can follow him on Substack to keep up with his work.
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