During a Tuesday interview with TMZ, Kanye West said, “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice.” The blowback was immediate and Kanye is now trying to explain himself to those only interested in destroying him, even if it is with a “gotcha.”
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. Like, you were there for 400 years and it’s all of you all? Like, we’re mentally in prison,” West said, adding, “Like, slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. So prison is something that unites us as one race, blacks and whites being one race. We’re the human race.”
Kanye West first caught hell from TMZ staffer Van Lathan.
“While you are making music and being an artist, and living the life that you’ve earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives,” Lathan said. “We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was a choice. Frankly, I’m disappointed, I’m appalled, and brother, I am unbelievably hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something, to me, that’s not real.”
The Grammy-winner tried to apologize. Lathan only walked away.
The usual suspects then piled on, including CNN’s Don Lemon and Black Lives Matter activist DeRay McKesson, both basically told the rap superstar to shut up.
For his part, West, and those close to him, are saying that this was meant to be a metaphor, but one expressed unartfully. If you read the full quote above, he appears to be talking about a prison of the mind, the idea of allowing slavery to not only hold you back but to segregate yourself from others. Hence, his “prison” metaphor is something both blacks and whites can relate to.
After the story blew up, West took to his Twitter feed to further explain.
“The reason why I brought up the 400 years point is because we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought It was just an idea,” he tweeted.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991466506725744642
“Once again,” he tweeted immediately after, “I am being attacked for presenting new ideas.”
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991466590758518784
“In school we need to learn how [M]agic Johnson built his business not always about the past. Matter fact I’ve never even heard of a high school class that presents future ideas,” West said. “When the media masses and scholars talk about what started today. Here’s a title … the overground hell road.”
in school we need to learn how magic Johnson built his business not always about the past. Matter fact I've never even heard of a high school class that presents future ideas
— ye (@kanyewest) May 1, 2018
West’s final tweet on the matter was a quote from Harriet Tubman. “I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves,” he wrote.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/991476958721556487
Perhaps West’s biggest problem with this flare up is the lack of generosity from those who are the most threatened by his political apostasy — the far-left in general as personified by Lemon and McKesson. Once a black American bolts from the Leftwing Thought Plantation, they immediately become a target for personal and professional destruction.
As a result, any gotcha moment is going to be gotcha’d to death.
Joy Reid can be a lying homophobe all day long and no one cares because she is ideologically pure. Kanye, however, is a Defcon 1 threat to the Democrat Party’s hold on power, which means that like Clarence Thomas, Herman Cain, and Dr. Ben Carson before him, he must be stripped of his blackness, smeared as a sellout, all as a means destroy his influence in the black community and as a warning to others who may be considering the same apostasy.
Kanye spoke of the slavery of the mind. Now he is getting a direct taste of the mob brutality that comes from those who enforce that slavery.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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