Lauded writer Ta-Nehisi Coates argues in a new Atlantic essay that Kanye West is not only championing “white freedom” — freedom without responsibility— in his commentary and belief about slavery being “a choice,” but he’s also feeding into propaganda.
“West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe,” Coates writes. “These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.”
Coates goes on to draw comparisons between Michael Jackson’s God-like stature in the African-American community, and what it meant to watch his physical deterioration and change from black to white.
“It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride,” Coates writes. “And maybe this, too, is naïve, but I wonder how different his life might have been if Michael Jackson knew how much his truly black face was tied to all of our black faces, if he knew that when he destroyed himself, he was destroying part of us, too…And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of ‘I,’ but a black freedom that called him back — back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.”
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