I can’t help, but be struck by the seemingly unanimous anti-Kanye sentiment pervading this nation right now. Almost every celebrity that has said his name in the past week has condemned not just his statements, but him as a person and what they perceive is his mindset.
I wrestled with this as I read the Ta-Nehisi Coates article in The Atlantic and prayed for a fresh voice as he is often hailed as offering, but only getting an amplified echo of the same sentiments being propagated by the media, whose financial statements are getting a huge boost by the “ally” movement that is pervading American culture right now.
The first day that I saw the 2 minute clip juxtaposing Kanye’s careless statement about slavery with TMZ staffer, Van Lathan’s biting confrontation, I immediately believed I knew the entire story and was outraged by what I saw enough to cry out on every social media platform I owned. Imagine my embarrassment when I went on to watch all the footage of every Kanye interview in recent times and found that I do not agree with the public outrage as much as I thought I did from watching the cleverly editted video.
All people hear, and react to is Kanye’s sloppy remark that slaves chose to remain slaves, and not many of them are stopping to ask themselves any question about the larger context of what is going on. People are immediately outraged by what they have concluded is the effects of fame, fortune and being married to a Kardashian getting to their once beloved hero.
However, I wrestled with the question of, “what seems to be happening to Kanye West, what message is he actually trying to get across, is the public receiving it correctly, and what do they really need?” The conclusions I came to are so uncommon to the generally accepted rhetoric, that I am sure if anyone cares to read this article, many (if not all) will turn away before the end.
I want to start with a quote from the classic movie, “Scarface.” This movie, a classic, because there is no point in American history where it’s story does not ring true in some way, has a scene that easily resonates to every human in every moment in history everywhere for ever:
“What you lookin’ at? You all a bunch of fuckin’ assholes. You know why? You don’t have the guts to be what you wanna be? You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin’ fingers and say, “That’s the bad guy.” So… what that make you? Good? You’re not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don’t have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There’s a bad guy comin’ through! Better get outta his way!” -Scarface (1983)
Oh! How I wish I was a cartoonist so that I could draw an image of Black America propping up White supremacy as they all carry tiki torches and crucify Kanye on a cross…in a graveyard…surrounded by other dead Black icons like Michael Jackson, Martin Luther King and Tupac Shakur (maybe just their gravestones) and with Omarosa and OJ Simpson flanked on their own crosses to Kanye’s right and left.
The point of this illustration being that Blacks prop up White supremacy, whether we know it, like it, or not. Probably 99.999% of us remain comfortably complicit in the narrative assigned to us by White supremacy, and when a fellow Black person breaks character (whether by folly, or fancy), they are immediately crucified by Black people as provoked by White supremacy.
Everything about what we call “Black-ness” is a gruesome outgrowth of the system of White supremacy which we constantly rage against. From the English we speak (or augment for our own purposes), to style of clothing we wear (or modify), to the fiat currency we spend the majority of our lives working to accumulate. Our participation in this system ensures our oppression by said system.
Similar to the Matrix, the majority of us can not even conceive of what escaping said Matrix would look like. None of us is certain that any attempts to free others from said Matrix will liberate any (not even oneself). So, we continue laboring in the plantation of willful oppression, looking for a savior, but never truly wanting salvation, because on some level we not only believe that “what nourishes me, destroys me” but that it must be so.
The future is bleak. We are creating the weapons that are being used to destroy us. We are making money for the people who will one day buy up our communities and relegate us to slums. Then, every so often, one of us, bolstered by an inflated sense of self, begins to speak the pure and present truth of our condition. A truth that hurts us to our core, because it reveals who we are. It is kind of an “emperor is naked” moment. Where we all wake up to the fact that we have nothing shielding our vulnerability. So, we become the shield, but we don’t attack the problem, we attack the messenger!
“You’re giving ammo to the oppressors!” we cry out… Uh, so what are you doing? What is Black America (and African immigrants) doing when they make purchases that send money into White pockets for all of their basic needs? What are Black people doing when they opt out of African languages, or bilingualism for the English language? What are Blacks doing when the support White media, White businesses and banks, and complain that their own people don’t have the best quality, yet make no effort to improve that condition? What exactly are we doing?
We need people like Kanye to show us what we are becoming. Kanye is not an anomaly. He is the canary in the coal mine.
Kanye says “love your oppressors,” and everyone immediately hates him, because they don’t want to acknowledge the plain truth of the matter which is you have no choice. You already do. You have already chosen your oppressor over yourself in every single way. So, what are you going to do about it?
And probably nobody will see this article as anything practical. Some White people may even see it as extremist. That’s fine, and unsurprising in a rebel-without-a-cause culture similar to the tattoo and piercing culture of the ’90s that turned millions of people who went from bucking the status quo, to becoming a trend, to hiding their tattoos under white-collared shirts in 2018. I get it. It’s expected. Just do this for me, will you? Whoever you are, take your daily routines and the routines of your community (whatever they may be), multiply them by 7 billion and extrapolate them 20, 50 or 100 years into the future. What has the world become as a result of what you are promoting on a daily basis? If you are OK with that, then, have a nice day. That’s your future.
