Nicely, final week, West gave the white supremacists a lift.
West is identical man who in 2013 was promoting merchandise with Accomplice flags on tour. As he defined to a radio station that 12 months about folks’s appalled reactions:
“Any vitality is nice vitality. The Accomplice flag represented slavery in a means. That’s my summary tackle what I learn about it, proper? So I wrote the music ‘New Slaves.’ So I took the Accomplice flag and made it my flag. It’s my flag now.”
Kanye pitches it as co-option, however it’s, actually, primary shock-value antics that promote and normalize anti-Black hate symbols.
There’s nothing genius about this. It’s cut price basement exploitation. As West put it himself, “any vitality is nice vitality,” which is simply an virtually non secular, if jargony, means of reinterpreting what Oscar Wilde wrote in “The Image of Dorian Grey” within the late 1800s: “There is just one factor on the planet worse than being talked about, and that isn’t being talked about.” The spirit of that concept led to “all publicity is nice publicity.”
After the newest outcry over the “White Lives Matter” shirt he wore at Trend Week, West continued his publicity searching for by happening Fox Information to elaborate. The interview was a jumble of themes during which he tried to weave collectively godliness, creative inspiration, private persecution, disdain for establishments, anti-abortion speaking factors, an inversion on the concepts round racism and his help for Donald Trump. You understand, core concepts of the fashionable proper wing.
West says of the shirt, “The reply to why I wrote ‘White Lives Matter’ on a shirt is as a result of they do.” He performs oblivious to the apparent.
West is identical man who mentioned in 2015 that “racism is a dated idea,” and that “it’s like a foolish idea that folks” use “to separate, to alienate, to pinpoint something. It’s silly.”
He is identical man who mentioned in a TMZ interview in 2018: “You hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That seems like a selection. Like, you was there for 400 years, and it’s all of y’all?”