Speaking Truth To Kanye: Critics Say He’s Doing Harm

Written by Dana Sanchez

In his apparent quest to get attention and keep getting it, Kanye West suggested during a TMZ interview on Tuesday that American slavery was a “choice,” prompting a shocked TMZ senior producer, Van Lathan, to suggest West wasn’t thinking at all.

“Do you feel like I’m thinking free and feeling free?” West asked people present in the newsroom during the interview, CNN reported.

“I actually don’t think you’re thinking anything,” Lathan replied. “I think what you’re doing right now is actually the absence of thought.”

Musical artist and entrepreneur will.i.am has led the backlash against Kanye after he claimed that African Americans had a choice in being enslaved for 400 years.

West

Kanye’s comments “broke my heart” and were “harmful,” will.i.am said, according to BBC:

That was “one of the most ignorant statements that anybody who came from the hood could ever say about their ancestors.”

Kanye gained a reputation for speaking truth to power, but in the last few weeks, “speaking truth to Kanye West has become the norm,” Jon Caramanica wrote in the New York Times:

The old Kanye “lambastes the executives who don’t grant him full creative and
financial freedom. He calls into question the empathy of a president on live
television. He lays bare his emotions in ways that disrupt tidy narratives about
celebrity …. He is a lit match in search of a fuse, setting fires that people
(largely) cheer for. But in the last couple of weeks, as Mr. West has begun his return to public life after a quiet year, the roles have switched: He is the power,” Caramanica wrote.

TMZ’s Lathan said Kanye is entitled to his opinion, but there are real-world, real-life consequences behind everything that he says:

“And 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 the 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,” Lathan concluded.
It was the mic drop heard round the social media world.

Later Kanye tweeted in his own defense, “of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will,” BBC reported. Then Kanye added that he was “being attacked for presenting new ideas”. Those tweets were unavailable at the time of this publication.

Kanye has been criticized recently and during the 2016 election campaign for supporting President Donald Trump and wearing a Make America Great Again hat. He also took heat from radio personality Ebro Darden for supporting the Black conservative pundit Candace Owens.

Kanye insists he is coming from a place of love.

Twitter users had fun with that. One thread evolved into a discussion of happiness, and why Kanye is doing what’s he’s doing.

https://twitter.com/reSailorMac/status/991749002549841920
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