Is Kanye Racist?

If You're An Agent Of White Supremacy Then What Else Are You...?

The idea that Black people can’t be racist is built on the notion that Black people don’t have access to the power to wield white supremacy and thus cannot be racist. But Dr. Ibram Kendi says we cannot be neutral in the battle against racism—either we are racist or anti-racist. There is no sitting the game out. America’s systems will automatically produce racist outcomes if we do nothing so either we are doing things that fight against white supremacy or we are perpetuating it. Black people are not free from this—we can absolutely do things that perpetuate white supremacy. As an easy example, look at Sam Jackson’s Stephen in Django Unchained. He is a handmaiden of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Master Candy, lording over the other slaves, warning him when he’s being tricked, helping him maintain power. He is an agent of white supremacy. His behavior is absolutely racist. You need not be a captain of industry or a Judge or a police officer to perpetuate racism. Candace Owens’s career is about helping white supremacy. She stands on the notion that Black people can’t be racist and says things that would get some white people cancelled. She uses the Get Out Of Being Racist card to be racist and get paid for it. She is absolutely an agent of white supremacy. The first time many people became aware of Candace was when Kanye tweeted about her.

When I was writing my 2012 book about Blackness Who's Afraid Of Post-Blackness: What It Means To Be Black Now one of the professors I interviewed taught me the folly of trying to determine whether or not a person is racist. This involves peering into their soul and judging where they stand for their entire life and leads to them pulling out a Black friend or two as exculpatory evidence as if the charge of being a racist requires one to be hateful and oppressive toward every single Black person they met. This is an impossible standard—most people are far more complex than that standard suggests. And as Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, says in her recent interview on Dr. Marc Lamont Hill’s great new podcast Coffee and Books, most of the racism many of us encounter on a daily basis is probably microaggressions from well-meaning white liberals rather than more over attacks from ill-intentioned would-be Klansmen. The point is this: I long ago dispensed with trying to figure out whether people are racist, which is very hard, and instead now I focus much more on whether a given action is racist. Has someone performed a racist act? Well-intentioned people can perform racist acts—even DiAngelo concedes that she sometimes makes mistakes. We all have blind spots and can do things that help perpetuate white supremacy. Even, sometimes Black people like, say, Kanye.

When Kanye was merely supporting Donald Trump and wearing his neo-Klan hood hat, that was bad enough. But now he has gone a long step farther: he is conducting a “Presidential campaign” and fighting to get on the ballot in several states and succeeding in some. He will be on the ballot in Colorado and Oklahoma and has a chance to appear on several others (though he has missed his chance in North Carolina, New Mexico, Texas, Michigan, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin). This is an effort, by Republican operatives, to use him to siphon Black votes away from Joe Biden. So he is not trying to become President, he is working to help re-elect Trump as a sortof electoral blocker. This makes him a powerful agent of white supremacy, a solider in its war to stay in power. He is hoping to effectively disenfranchise Black voters, to give them a place to send their vote that won’t block Trump’s chance to win again. This is racist behavior on a grand scale. Kanye would probably tell you that he loves Black people and surely has many Black friends and is a central part of modern Black pop culture so it may seem strange to think of him as racist but his actions in this Presidential race on behalf of Trump are consciously meant to help Trump and thus to perpetuate white supremacy. Kanye is like Trump’s Stephen just at a much larger level.

Kim you better get your man.

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Toward A Black VP

On the eve of Biden announcing his VP choice it feels increasingly certain to me that he will choose a Black woman. There are always ways of signaling who is no longer in the running—Amy Klobuchar didn’t drop out all on her own—and for the Biden campaign to have multiple Black women hanging in the wind for so long only to choose a white woman would seem particularly cruel. For a campaign that seems intent on coming across as decent and dignified and risk-averse and not offensive to anyone, I would be surprised if they skipped a chance to add a sense of history to their ticket—the first Black female VP gives the ticket a sheen and a purpose that no white woman could add.

Surely the Biden campaign is aware that there are large numbers of voters who now say a Black VP is important to them. Recent polling of voters in key swing states by my friends Karen Finney and Cornell Belcher found 60% of Millennial and Gen Z voters said it was important for Biden to pick a Black woman as his running mate and a majority of Black and brown women and a plurality of white women and college-educated women said it was important that a Black woman be chosen. It appears likely that this glass ceiling will be broken which is valuable and important in part because Black women have long been the spine of the Democratic party. No demographic shows up as completely for one party as Black women do for Dems. They are the major reason why Black voters tend to be the deciders in the Democratic primary. To finally elevate a Black woman to the #2 job in the country will be a powerful symbol.

Who will it be? It sounds like Biden has narrowed the Black women in his search to four—Congresswoman Val Demmings, Ambassador Susan Rice, Congresswoman Karen Bass, and Senator Kamala Harris. (It appears as though Stacey Abrams is out of the running even though she would be an amazing, inspiring, powerful choice. If it were Governor Abrams in this race she would probably be very hard to avoid.) The only candidate in this group who would make me lose my mind in anger and pull out my hair is Demmings. In the year of BLM it would be tone deaf and offensive to put a 27 year police officer and former police chief on the ticket. There are no good cops and bad cops, there is a system of policing that all cops must conform to that makes them the pawns of white supremacy and Demmings was fully invested in that system. She is the only candidate who would force me to seriously consider not voting. I would feel abandoned by the Democratic party. I would welcome Susan Rice, though in this strange campaign environment it could be tough to nominate someone who has never run for office. Also voters know nothing of her politics. Is she moderate? Progressive? She would cause Fox to go back into Benghazi apoplexy but I don’t think that would cost Biden a single voter and as a general matter I think it’s important that Biden and Dems in general avoid the notion of ‘Don’t do X because Trump or Fox will say…’ Trump and Fox are not honest brokers, they will lie about Biden’s positions (fact check: he’s not in favor of defunding the police) and being overly worried about what Trump or Fox will say puts them in the position of deciding who Dems are. California Congresswoman Karen Bass would be a powerful choice—she’s the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and a former Civil Rights activist and an ER physician’s assistant so she’s deeply conversant in two of the core issues of the year. She seems inoffensive but she fades in the shadow of Senator Kamala Harris. The public caterwauling of Senator Chris Dodd, a member of Biden’s VP choosing committee, tells me that Harris is leading the internal argument and Dodd is searching for any way to stop her. A good VP for Biden will be known to most of the country—in a year where the campaign feels all but frozen, introducing someone new will be hard. Harris is already a household name. A good VP for Biden will be perceived as ready to be President on Day One as well as ready in 2024. No one doubts that the Senator is ready. A good VP for Biden will be able to publicly attack Trump in ways that Biden cannot or will not. Out of all of the VP candidates, Harris is best suited to verbally stick knives into Trump with a smile. She can prosecute the case against him in a smart, classy way that lets Biden keep his hands clean. Biden’s campaign seems focused on how to woo Republicans who are on the ledge and make them feel good about voting for him without feeling like hypocrites. That’s why he’s more tepid in his attacks on Trump than many on the left want him to be. He wants to create a permission structure for people on the right to feel like they can vote for him without feeling like they made a mistake in 2016. Harris is best able to attack Trump and let Biden continue to play the nice guy.

You may be saying, wait, you’re ok with Harris the prosecutor but not Demmings the cop? Isn’t that hypocritical? It may be to some but I see a difference—prosecutors may work closely with police, translating their work into justice system, but the cops are on the street killing us with their hands. But there are Black people who dismissed Harris in the primary as a cop and refused to consider her candidacy.

Ultimately, I suspect this mini-primary will be decided by one superdelegate: Barack Obama. His will surely be the most important opinion outside of Biden’s own and I suspect that this give Harris an edge because Obama has been friends with Harris for a long time. He’s obviously close to Susan Rice as well, which may be why she’s gotten this far in the race, but at this point I struggle to see how Biden doesn’t choose Harris.

Either way, this is a victory for the Black women who have taken care of the Democratic party for so many years.

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Wap Is FIRE FLAMES

I listened to the new Cardi B x Megan Thee Stallion song about 20 times in a row and still wanted more. I think the race for Song of the Summer may be over even though the Savage Remix is still in HEAVY rotation in my car because my daughter and I both love it. She’s 11 so she won’t be listening to Wap for at least 7 years. I need a remix with Lil Kim, City Girls, Saweetie, Mulatto, and Trina on it.