Donovan Edwards calls his controversial retweet in 2022 a learning experience

Donovan Edwards found himself in hot water last year when he retweeted an anti-semitic post featuring Kanye West, something he explained as being both an accident and borne out of ignorance. Months later, he’s learned from that experience.

As a direct response, Edwards apologized at the time and participated in a trip to a local Holocaust museum with the Michigan football team this offseason. On Friday amid fall camp, he explained that he’s ultimately glad for how his horizons have expanded since.

“I got one thing one more thing to mention, too, about the tweet, as well. I feel like that was a great thing for me because it was a learning and building experience for me. The way I look at that is I don’t have any type of hatred, I don’t disgrace anybody. I have love for everybody, all people,” Edwards said. “… Everybody is God’s children in the eyes of God. There’s nothing in the Bible that says only one specific race can make it into the Heaven’s gates. Everybody can.”

The tweet, which read “Jewish people will literally tell you that they want you to kill your own and humiliate your women simply because they have children to feed” also featured a video of West saying similar inflammatory things about Jewish people.

Edwards also offered some further context for what he had hoped to express at the time of the retweet, explaining that he wanted to express frustration about the marginalization and diminishment of Black men, like himself. He hasn’t backed down from voicing his support for Black people, but Edwards has certainly learned to more careful in how he does that.

He knows now that he fumbled the moment badly and has learned and hopes to move forward from it. He also seems confident in who he is at heart, hoping that others see his insensitive retweet as a blip on the radar and not indicative of a wider trend of something sinister behind the scenes.

“All religions have the same thing and that is to love God and treat your neighbor accordingly and to love each other the way that you love yourself. So I’ve learned a lot from that, you know. And that’s why I don’t deprive myself of who I am, because I know who I am. If you ask people in this building who really know me, they’ll say I’m a great person and I believe that myself, too,” Edwards said.