I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye

The triumvirate of early-career Kanye West solo records (not including mixtapes, nor his brilliant producing career) would all probably rank somewhere in my top fifty or so favorite hip-hop records of all time, if ever I deigned to make such a list. The College Dropout and Late Registration, especially, but also Graduation to a lesser extent, soundtracked my early- and mid-twenties. From 2004 to 2007, I would guess I had fewer days where I didn’t listen to Kanye than days where I did. I found things to like in 808s & Heartbreak and his subsequent records, but none of them grabbed me quite the same way as those first ones.

Even if the weight of Kanye’s recent art hasn’t hit me with the same force as his older stuff, he’s still been an important figure in my life. His recent embrace of Trumpism, and maybe even more so his willingness to drag all of black history through the mud in service of said embrace, have been painful to watch, although maybe we should have seen it coming given their shared egoism and proudly brandished hyper-ignorance. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve thought about blogging about all of this, but I could never find the right inroad. Instead I mostly found myself reading things like this, from Damon Young, and nodding along:

(Sidebar: Young’s writing at Very Smart Brothas is pretty much always good and is definitely worth bookmarking.)

Anyway, today, Ta-Nehisi Coates emerged from a period of relative quiet to author what is the best thing I’ve read about Kanye. It is, of course, about much more than Kanye himself — Michael Jackson, race, history, collective obligation, and so on. I am only excerpting some of Coates’ concluding thoughts, but please, read the whole:

In his visit with West, the rapper T.I. was stunned to find that West, despite his endorsement of Trump, had never heard of the travel ban. “He don’t know the things that we know because he’s removed himself from society to a point where it don’t reach him,” T.I. said. West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

The consequences of Kanye West’s unlettered view of America and its history are, if anything, more direct. For his fans, it is the quality of his art that ultimately matters, not his pronouncements. If his upcoming album is great, the dalliance with Trump will be prologue. If it’s bad, then it will be foreshadowing. In any case what will remain is this—West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. 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. 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.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of. West, in his own way, will likely pay also for his thin definition of freedom, as opposed to one that experiences history, traditions, and struggle not as a burden, but as an anchor in a chaotic world.

It is often easier to choose the path of self-destruction when you don’t consider who you are taking along for the ride, to die drunk in the street if you experience the deprivation as your own, and not the deprivation of family, friends, and community. And maybe this, too, is naive, 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. I wonder if his life would have been different, would have been longer. 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.