Ta-Nehisi Coates SLAMS Kanye: West Pushing 'White Freedom,' Allying With Slaveholders
You see, in the end, West isn’t an individual. He is a mere cog in the machine of race – an important cog, to be sure, but a cog. And he must remain in his place in the machine, lest the gears grind to a halt. And because West doesn’t think like Coates, the machine has been endangered:
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 #### you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
This is actually racist nonsense. First off, how can Coates assume that all black Americans somehow oppose the travel ban? Six in ten Americans support it; there are apparently no polls that show racial breakdown. Simply because Kanye doesn’t know things doesn’t mean he must agree with Coates on them. Why is “free thinking” necessarily “white thinking”? Coates own logic is self-defeating: if free thinking means agreeing with Coates, it isn’t particularly free. But Coates quickly places West in league with slaveholders, lumps together slaveholders and advocates for Stand Your Ground policies (which were not implicated legally in Florida’s Trayvon Martin case, by the way), and lumps both together with John C. Calhoun and the Iraq War and evil white suburbia.
If there’s a racist in this equation, his name rhymes with Ta-Nehisi Coates. But Coates is too busy calling West an alt-white racist to notice it, and blaming West for every ill that Coates believes America suffers:
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.