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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAlt-Right Cheers Kanye West's 'Slavery Is a Choice' TMZ Rant
Though he tried to take it back, Yeezy gained more fans in the racist swamps of the internet.
KELLY WEILL
05.02.18 1:34 PM ET
Kanye West did nothing wrong when he described slavery as a choice, his new supporters on the alt-right say.
West, who has spent the past week tweeting praise for conservative internet figures, reached new levels of adulation on the far right after his comments during a Tuesday TMZ interview. Wests implication, that slaves were partially responsible for their condition and that black Americans need to get over slavery, plays into far-right talking points.
When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years? That sounds like a choice, Kanye said during the interview. Like, you were there for 400 years and its all of yall? He levied the comments into a metaphor about free thought. Its like were mentally in prison. I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks.
Later, on Twitter, West attempted to clarify. "To make myself clear. Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will," he tweeted. "My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved."
more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/alt-right-cheers-kanye-wests-slavery-is-a-choice-tmz-rant?ref=home
HopeAgain
(4,407 posts)in that Kanye just wants attention regardless of what effect it has on others. Let's not give it to him.
CatMor
(6,212 posts)"numbers were on our side". Certainly not in population numbers in this country so I don't know what he's saying.
OldHippieChick
(2,434 posts)slaves had all the guns and whips and plenty of options.
Mosby
(16,299 posts)Their owners and then just hopped on a train to Chicago or new York.
Easy peasy.
DBoon
(22,354 posts)did not end well for the slaves
hlthe2b
(102,225 posts)perhaps some mental illness, but in trying to figure out any possible meaning (which is an unpleasant exercise), I'm wondering if he is trying to allude to those African tribes that were complicit in selling captured members of warring tribes to white slave traders. This is something that the far right loves to point at to "spread the blame" for the whole issue of slavery and which brings nothing but warranted disdain from anyone with a conscience and full knowledge of history and the scope of those activities... but...
lunasun
(21,646 posts)besides the disorientation , hey how come there are POWs taken in groups who don't escape a small group of captors ?
Yeah he is certified trump material
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/
One of the most pernicious allegations made against the African-American people was that our slave ancestors were either exceptionally docile or content and loyal, thus explaining their purported failure to rebel extensively. Some even compare enslaved Americans to their brothers and sisters in Brazil, Cuba, Suriname and Haiti, the last of whom defeated the most powerful army in the world, Napoleons army, becoming the first slaves in history to successfully strike a blow for their own freedom.
As the historian Herbert Aptheker informs us in American Negro Slave Revolts, no one put this dishonest, nakedly pro-slavery argument more baldly than the Harvard historian James Schouler in 1882, who attributed this spurious conclusion to the innate patience, docility, and child-like simplicity of the negro who, he felt, was an imitator and non-moralist, learning deceit and libertinism with facility, being easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots ; in short, Negroes were a black servile race, sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient to the whip, children in imagination.
Lets consider the five greatest slave rebellions in the United States, about which Donald Yacovone and I write in the forthcoming companion book to my new PBS series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.
Only seen it a few times on business travel but imo TMZ is trash that would attract the head shakers in agreement on statements like that
LanternWaste
(37,748 posts)Mr West may want to read about the consequences of Nat Turner's (who was most emphatically not in a mental prison) 1831 attempt at freedom.
Then again, I doubt Mr West's depth of literary interest goes beyond People magazine.
octoberlib
(14,971 posts)Mosby
(16,299 posts)octoberlib
(14,971 posts)kacekwl
(7,016 posts)cwydro
(51,308 posts)As I heard Don Lemon say, he needs to pick up a history book.