You don't have to be white to be a white supremacist.
From the days of the atrocious realities of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade until this very moment, an extremely painful fact remains true––oppressive white people in power have always needed someone Black to help them do their dirtiest work. You'd be hard pressed to find a single large plantation that ever existed without a Black man who exchanged his dignity for some measure of protection from the monsters around him. That's some of what's so ugly about the conservative, even white-supremacist turn that Kanye West has taken. It has history.
Read the book Black Anglo-Saxons by Nathan Hare. Read Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. Read the Psychopathic Racial Personality by Dr. Bobby Wright. Read Yurugu by Dr. Marimba Ani. In each of these texts you will learn that under enough pressure, people will make soul-crushing decisions to sell out their own people to curry favor with the oppressor.
And let me be unmistakably clear: I don't think the Democratic Party is a righteous savior and I don't think the Republican Party is the modern-day devil. For Kanye West, it's deeper than that––although, like Trump being scorned and humiliated by a joking President Obama at the Correspondent's Dinner is often thought to have been a breaking point that led Trump to run for president, I do wonder sometimes if Obama calling Kanye "a jackass" off the record in 2009 and on the record 3 years later had anything to do with Kanye's flight toward Trump and conservatism.
What we do know now, though, is that Kanye is saying and doing the very things that white supremacists do. He is literally wearing and promoting "White Lives Matter" shirts. He is making overtly anti-Semitic threats against Jewish people and promoting offensive tropes about Jews that are word-for-word ripped from 4-chan hell. He is lying and spreading white supremacist talking points about George Floyd––who was murdered in broad daylight in one of the single most despicable public acts of violence in modern American history. Who even does that??? And now we've learned that Kanye is literally trying to purchase Parler, the right-wing social media platform that was so overtly racist and dangerous that it was removed from all app stores. A big chunk of the attack on the Capitol was planned on Parler. And here's the thing: If it walks like a bigot and talks like a bigot, it's a bigot.
Kanye West is a hateful bigot who is now openly, gleefully, forcefully doing the bidding of white supremacy. It's gross. My friend and brother, Van Lathan, said that Kanye actually professed his love for Hitler and Nazism on TMZ on the same day he said that "slavery was a choice" back in 2018, but that TMZ edited this confession out. He was so offensive, anti-Black and anti-Jew on LeBron's show, "The Shop," that they decided not to even air the show.
He's not just gross and he damn sure isn't just a "free-thinker": Kanye West is now a full-blown white supremacist. His thinking, his speaking, his ideas and even his very clothing now mimic and parrot well-worn white supremacist ideology. I would say that it's a sad turn of events, but this turn has been in motion for at least a decade. Now he's just fully embraced it. It's sad, but more than that, it's dangerous, because this man will now spread his white supremacist thinking like wildfire to people that could never be reached by Proud Boys or the Alt-Right. At least now they can all say they have one Black friend.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
