theatlantic | What Kanye West seeks is what Michael Jackson sought—liberation from the dictates of that we.
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.
