So recently I have been printing out all the Breitbart postings about the controversy surrounding Kanye West and West's statements regarding slavery. I initially wasn't thinking that much about it, but I noticed that there was a tremendous amount of condemnation of Kanye West but also, it was interesting that other pop cultural figures came to West's defense, such as Justin Bieber.
Something about the outrage over Kanye West got me thinking.
Former president Bill Clinton wrote three letters of congratulations to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The neoliberal press and the media that is just furious about Kanye West has never been interested. Democrats have given me all sorts of rationalizations over the years.
Hillary Clinton had her infamous "super predator" remarks some time back, but that doesn't seem to be a concern.
Then there was the 2009 letter sent to former president Barack Obama asking him not to send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument. Letters were later written asking Obama to put an end to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) handing out of neo-Confederate awards at the U.S. Military Academies. Additional letters were sent about the Arlington Confederate. Never got any response to any of the issues about neo-Confederate involvement in the federal government.
https://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/
In 2009, prior to Obama sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument the neoliberal press mounted an effort to sideline the issue and rationalize Obama sending the wreath. The Washington Post took a leadership role in this with the New York Times in a supporting role.
When Obama spoke at the Arlington Cemetery in 2009 what references that were made to the issue sounded like he was channeling former president Woodrow Wilson. At the end I was somewhat glad that Obama's speech didn't involve any history written with lightning. Democrats had all sorts of rationalizations for Obama and it was made really clear that the letter was not welcome. The persons who had supported the effort lost interest. Obama did send a wreath to the African American Civil War Museum in DC and that was supposed to make it okay and I was told, "Let's declare victory and move on."
Of course there was the Obama "Beer Summit" which occurred before cell phone cameras and social media had advanced such that police abuse and murder of African Americans was routinely captured on video and shared online in social media and new online media websites.
Regarding Confederate monument removal you read here and there in the neoliberal media that being active against Confederate monuments is supposedly falling into some trap that Trump is setting.
I am not seeing a lot of interested by the Democratic Party in the Black Lives Matter movement or discussion about Confederate monuments.
The operating policy of the Democratic Party is that African Americans have no place to go so if they don't like the Democratic Party policies they can lump it.
Meanwhile there a desperate searching for some magic formula to shake loose a few more white votes for the Democratic Party. Progressives are lectured in the neoliberal press to stop being concerned about Democratic candidates positions on issues, that the winning of elections is paramount.
So into this situation comes Kanye West openly admiring president Donald Trump and saying slavery was a choice. West's views and behavior suggests that African Americans do have the Republican Party as an alternative.
Kanye West is a major entertainment figure and has a substantial base of fans. On Twitter he has 28.2 million followers. (The story that he lost 10 million followers is incorrect, twitter had a glitch and when corrected there was no loss of 10 million followers.) This number of Twitter followers is after all the controversy over West and any supposed lost.
A short tweet, "free thinking is a super power," on May 8th, by West gets 5,100 comments, 46,000 retweets, and 180,000 hearts.
On Facebook there are various pages for him, with hundred or millions of likes. One page which is just a topic page has over 9 million likes. West currently has his Instagram account shut down, but the number of comments about Kanye West are over 5 million.
What is worrisome to the Democrats is that their program of civil rights is not very substantial and West might be validating to African Americans that African Americans should consider the Republican Party of Donald Trump.
David A. Love had an article in the Atlanta Black Star titled, "Should the Kanye West MAGA Debacle Remind Black People That It's Time to Hold Democrats and Liberals Accountable?"
http://atlantablackstar.com/2018/05/06/kanye-west-maga-debacle-remind-black-people-time-hold-democrats-liberals-accountable/
Nice sentiment, and good luck with that.
Chance the Rapper was chastised for a tweet in support of Kanye West but had this to say:
My statement about black folk not having to be democrats (though true) was a deflection from the real conversation and stemmed from a personal issue with the fact that Chicago has had generations of democratic officials with no investment or regard for black schools, neighborhoods, or black lives,” he said. “We have to talk honestly about what is happening and has been happening in this country and we have to challenge those who are responsible, as well as those who are giving them a pass,” the rapper concluded. “If that happens to include I love, someone who is my brother-in-Christ and someone who I believe does really want to do what is right, it’s not my job to defend or protect him. It’s my job [to] pick up the phone and talk to him about it.” (Taken from David A. Love's article.)It is not just leftists or political economists who are realizing that the Democrats policy on civil rights is the general idea that African Americans have nowhere to go and a Democratic candidate needs to search for a Sistah Souljah moment, or speak out and tell those African American men to pull up their pants to validate themselves with white voters.
But also, I sense there is a little bit of panic. I don't think that the general public really cares about what the Washington Post or New York Times has to say on West. I don't think the neoliberal press will have that much affect on West's fan base.
I live in Oak Cliff section of Dallas, and I notice that there are a lot off African American male pants not pulled up. Maybe I should tell them that Obama says pull up their pants and see what the reaction is. I wonder what the response would be? (I am being sarcastic and ironic and in no way would I do that.)
In short the fan base of of Kanye West largely isn't going to care about the fulminations of the neoliberals. Justin Bieber realized his fan base doesn't care either and came out in support of Kanye West. I am not hearing a lot of condemnation from Hollywood figures either who I think realize that West does have a lot of fans who would not be sympathetic to such a condemnation of West.
Remember when the National Review put out an issued devoted to the single topic of condemning Donald Trump and it had no impact on politics? I think that is what might be happening here. Neoliberals go thunder your Bull against West.
Of course Kanye West career might be on the way out, but pop stars are like meteors. They flash across the sky and blaze in the heavens and vanish. I don't think his career is going to be that much impacted. What will happen to it will not be that impacted by this. In a month West might be focused on something else and the media will be on some other topic. West's career might go one way or another and these recent remarks will have little impact.
Basically I think that the reaction to Kanye West's statements is in some sectors of the press, selective outrage. Bill Clinton sends letters to the United Daughters of the Confederacy and bringing up the topic is dismissed with annoyance. Obama sends a wreath to the Arlington Confederate monument and bring up that as a topic is dismissed with annoyance. Kanye West saying something about slavery being a choice, and all hell breaks loose.
I think the neoliberals see the Trump presidency as some type of inter period. The Blue Wave will come and if they can just keep the Progressives under control everything will be restored to the earlier status quo. Even better they will have sunk the Republicans and thus defeated the neoconservatives as competitors for establishment support.
However, I see the situation as fluid. One of the things that I was taught in ancient history is that when the Western Roman Empire fell it took a while for people to realize it was really over. The empire had lost provinces and restored itself many times before. Maybe the old political regime is gone forever. This doesn't necessarily mean that Trump is the future, but we are entering a new situation.
The Democratic narrative is that with time demographics will mean the doom of the Republican Party. Tomorrow belongs to them is the thinking. The Blue Wave is one idea of inevitable triumph. However, with Kanye West maybe some demographic groups are not locked up after all.
Labor market shows signs of tightening also. Articles talk about companies dropping drug testing for marijuana so they can find more workers, others about wage increases in fast food. Economics counts for a lot in elections and I don’t think the Democrats crediting it to the previous administration will have much effect.
Trumph has invited Colin Kaepernick to the White House. Would a Democratic president do such a thing? I doubt it. Obama invited police officers who had abused Louis Gates. Has Hillary Clinton met with Kaepernick? No. Nor is it likely that would ever happen. Yes, Trump uses the term “Bigly,” and neoliberals can be disdainful, but he did defeat both the Republican and the Democratic establishments with very little money or campaign apparatus. I think he has a type of cunning.
By the way here is another neoliberal lecture being given to Kaepernick for bringing up that the Democratic Party is missing in action about the issue of Black Lives Matter. Kaepernick crime was pointing out Clinton’s comments about “super predators.”
https://www.cnn.com/2016/08/30/opinions/where-kaepernick-lost-me-cane/index.html
It seems that these lectures to African Americans are becoming a regular thing.
The Democratic Party is out of power, neither controlling either house of Congress or the presidency. The neoliberals in particular are out of power, and so they can't necessarily punish dissenters as they might. I think people are realizing that being scolded by the New York Times or the Washington Post isn't quite the thing it used to be.
The whole matter with Kanye West might be just a blip, or it might be the beginning of a trend of African Americans realizing that the Democratic Party doesn't really care that much about their rights. If it is a new trend, in five years it will be proclaimed as an obvious beginning of a new trend, by various pundits and historians, like those who would write for the Washington Post, but I don't really know. I do think that the neoliberals are afraid that it could be a trend, that the African American vote won't be locked up.
Remember the victory in Alabama over Roy Moore? It was due to the Democrats getting an extremely high percentage of the vote of African Americans men, 93%, and African Americans women, 98%, which gave a sort of nothing Democrat Doug Jones a small percentage win. Of course Roy Moore was a neo-Confederate lunatic and that helps.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/glanton/ct-met-alabama-black-women-dahleen-glanton-20171213-story.html
If the percentages for Doug Jones by African American women had only been 95% against Roy Moore, an African American men 90%, Roy Moore well might be in the U.S. Senate today. Even a small loss of African American votes to the Republicans could have severe consequences to Democratic Party fortunes.
The Democrats have come to depend a lot on extremely high percentages of the African American vote falling their way. Of course it remains to be seen what Doug Jones' election means for African American women.
Well actually it doesn't. Read this article.
https://www.theroot.com/doug-jones-and-the-democratic-party-just-screwed-black-1823802570
That didn't take long.
What the Democrats should be concerned about is that low turnout for voting in the African American community is driven by the fact that voting for Democrats has had limited benefits for the African American community as pointed out by Chance the Rapper quoted above.
As for “choice,” the idea of slaves choosing suicide to avoid slavery goes way back in history. If I remember the accounts of ancient slavery in Pierre Dockes, “Medieval Slavery and Liberation,” Roman slave owners had punishments of throwing slaves into pits of moray eels or crucifixion because slaves were quite willing to commit suicide or get themselves killed to escape the brutal horror of ancient slavery and so death had to be really horrific to be a punishment.
There is in popular culture the whole idea of the captured African committing suicide rather than being a prisoner or slave. The character Killmonger does it in the movie Black Panther, Toni Morrison has a character who does it, in the movie Amistad there is a scene where a woman jumps overboard with a baby to prevent them from being enslaved.
What does this say about those who didn’t commit suicide. Those who survived and those from whom the present generation of African Americans are descended?
This is somewhat a modern and American historical problem. Slavery in the Caribbean and Brazil mostly meant being worked to death as did slavery in most places in most historical times. There sometimes weren't too many survivors. Slaves in mines just died and largely didn't have surviving generations.
The other issue is that race marks out African Americans as being descended from slaves. There were English slaves, villain is derived from the term villianage a type of bondage in early and medieval England. You can't tell among modern day English who was likely descended from slaves. Some of these ideas about choice have a consequence of potentially stigmatizing African Americans.
There are various classes of bound labor also, serfs, peons, etc. What are we saying about their survivors?
Patrick Henry said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” He was a slave owner. In ancient history soldiers who were captured were enslaved as an alternative to death and this was part of pro-slavery ideology. Are there historical roots of pro-slavery ideology in the narrative of dying rather than be a slave?
I am not saying that one should live under any circumstances. The idea of suicide being a sin is a Christian and Western idea. Japanese and other cultures don’t have a horror of it. I don’t know what the many African cultures thought in the past or think in the present about suicide.
I think that this whole thing about slaves committing suicide hasn’t been thought through.
It could be that with 2016 the neo-liberals win the U.S. House and in 2018 the U.S. Senate and the White House, and we do live in an inter-period and neo-liberalism will be restored but I am not so sure that is the case.
I am not saying that the future will be where Trump or others like him continue in power either. It could be that politics will have a new structure and new contenders and new alliances and configurations. There won't be a restoration of the pre-Trump political world.
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