If you’ve been studiously ignoring news about Kanye West over the last few days, here’s a quick catch-up: He’s been extremely active on social media, posting incessantly about his ex-wife Kim Kardashian, her new boyfriend Pete Davidson and various people he perceives to be against him, ranging from Billie Eilish to Frank Ocean to D.L. Hughley to, most recently, Trevor Noah. In that last instance, Instagram ruled he crossed the line into bullying and banned him from the platform for 24 hours.
Noah had spoken into all this on Tuesday’s episode of The Daily Show, saying that when he looked at Kim’s actions, he saw “a woman who wants to live her life without being harassed.” West — who is going by Ye these days – responded with the racial slur that got him kicked off Instagram.
Noah responded with a lengthy notes app screenshot, praising West’s creative genius and the impact he’s had while cautioning him against his recent actions towards his ex-wife. “It breaks my heart to see you like this,” he wrote. “I don’t care if you support Trump and I don’t care if you roast Pete. I do however care when I see you on a path that’s dangerously close to peril and pain.”
“You have every right to fight for your family,” Noah wrote. “But you have to know the difference between that and fighting your family. I’ve woken up too many times and read headlines about men who’ve killed their exes, their kids and then themselves. I never want to read that headline about you.”
Noah is speaking from experience here. His own stepfather shot his mother after she left while he was a child growing up during Apartheid in South Africa. His mother miraculously survived the bullet, which missed her brain by inches, and she urged Noah to forgive the man who shot her.
“I remember after the shooting, my mother was in the hospital, and all I felt was rage,” Noah told PEOPLE’s Jess Cagle in 2017. “My mother said to me, ‘Don’t hate him for doing this, but rather pity him because he too is a victim, in his own way, of a world that has thrust upon him an idea of masculinity that he has subscribed to and is now a part of. As for myself, I do not wish to imbue myself with a hatred that only I will carry.'”
Obviously, that’s a whole different world than the current dust-up between Kim and Kanye, but it might explain Noah’s sensitivity towards situations involving angry exes.
