14 DAY TRIAL // Kim Kardashian and her two half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie Jenner, are under serious fire online right now, after an audience camera at the MTV Video Music Awards 2014, which took place last night, caught them texting, chatting and laughing during the Ferguson moment of silence.
When rapper Common showed up on stage to present the nominees and announce the winners in the Best Hip Hop category, he used the opportunity to highlight the unrest and the violence taking place in Ferguson, Missouri, after an unarmed African American teenager was shot and killed by police several days ago.
A segment of his speech is included in the video below. The second one is the PSA that MTV ran during the awards gala.
“For the past two weeks, the eyes of the nation have been on Ferguson, Missouri,” he said. “The people in Ferguson and St. Louis and communities across the country have used their voices to call for justice and change, to let everyone know that each and every one of our lives matters.”
He went on to add that “hip hop has always been about truth and has been a powerful instrument of social change,” so, before introducing the nominees and announce the winner, he asked for a moment of silence for Michael Brown, the slain teen, and for “peace in this country and the world.”
As the cameras panned over famous members of the audience, viewers at home saw them with their eyes closed or hidden behind their dark sunglasses, heads bowed. Snoop Dogg raised one hand to flash a peace sign.
What the video below doesn’t show is included in the angry tweets also available below: during the same moment of silence, cameras captured Kim Kardashian and the Jenner girls apparently chatting, texting and laughing. When they’re not doing either of these activities, they just appear totally bored with what’s going on.
As you may imagine, reactions to this have been anything but calm or forgiving. Though there’s a chance that the time delay between the actual show and the live transmission may have caused this snafu, at this point, Twitter has already made up its mind: Kim and her sisters have been trialed and found guilty of gross insensitiveness and hypocrisy.
Some angry comments are even dragging up Kim’s recent essay on racism, which was penned at the time her reality show included an arc story in which she’d been subjected to racism by verbal abuse on the plane.
All those things she said in it (about how she felt “a responsibility as a mother, a public figure, a human being, to do what I can to make sure that not only my child, but all children, don’t have to grow up in a world where they are judged by the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual orientation”) were just publicity for her show, if these photos don’t lie and she was really too busy to be bothered to maintain a moment of silence for Ferguson.
listening to words about #Ferguson #VMAs pic.twitter.com/kYkTTnLroL
— Doree Shafrir (@doreeshafrir) August 25, 2014Kendall Jenner could literally care less about social change pic.twitter.com/sTwbptgsIt
— Rachel Zarrell (@rachelzarrell) August 25, 2014peak Kardashian moment pic.twitter.com/ETudaKLKI4
— Tabir Akhter (@tabooradley) August 25, 2014