Kanye West, hiphop megastar and provocateur, has not only embraced Donald Trump but also claims that "slavery was a choice." This has not been well received by most African-Americans. West's statement, is absurd on the face of it: why would people choose to be brutally exploited, beaten, raped, mutilated? West's defenders might try to say he's having a relapse of mental health problems he's had in the past. But is it?
We need to recognize there are 3 separate issues here:
1. Admiring a person's work,
2. Liking that person as a person,
3. Agreeing with every position a person happens to take.
Just because a celebrity meets criterion 1, doesn't entail 2 or 3. We need to get away from the blind worship of wealth and celebrity which led to Donald Trump.
The most powerful critique of West is the article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Atlantic "I'm not Black, I'm Kanye."
I will include this quote by Coates:
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."
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