Ramses Ja and Quinton Ward, two black activists who own the rights to White Lives Matter, are willing to sell the set to Kanye West for a hefty price.
As previously reported, Kanye sparked outrage in October when he debuted the “White Lives Matter” designs during the YZY Season 9 runway show. Last week, Ja and Ward, who host nationally syndicated radio show Civic Cipher, announced they received the brand as a gift from an anonymous benefactor sometime in September, just before Kanye unveiled the shirts.
Speaking to TMZ this weekend, the radio hosts admitted that while they don’t want to sell the brand, they would certainly consider doing so should anyone make a tempting offer. “Any potential buyer would have to come up with an offer of $1 billion to even consider a sale,” the outlet notes.
The news follows Ja and Ward’s recent conversation with ABC News, in which the couple claimed that nobody in America could legally sell any White Lives Matter products without getting their approval. In other words, anyone trying to make a profit off the phrase would have to enter negotiations with the couple’s legal department and potentially face a lawsuit.
“I recognize that one of two things could happen. Someone could come up to our attorney or to us and say, “Hey, you have the exclusive right to manufacture and sell this clothing in the United States of America. I would love to buy the brand for millions of dollars,'” Ja told Capital B News. “If we were to sell this brand, for whatever amount of money, we could donate that money to causes that we believe benefit black people, like the NAACP or Black Lives Matter organizations. Because realistically we cannot prevent the production of the shirts at the moment. We can now write a cease and desist letter to the people selling these shirts, but that’s a big monster that requires teams of lawyers and thousands of dollars that we don’t have.”