Kanye West’s Ideologies of Domination

As long as we are debating whether Kanye means what he says or why, our attention is far too narrow.

I have been hesitant to write anything about Kanye West. I don’t know him from a can of paint. He’s a performing artist. He’s obviously in distress. And he has values I deeply disagree with. What more is there to say? But the conversation around Kanye has opened up some questions about bigotry that I do think are worth exploring. And so, I’m weighing in as a roundabout way of getting to the truth of racism in the United States.

As most people know by now, Kanye West, the Black conservative media personality Candace Owens, and a host of models appeared at a Paris Fashion Week show last week wearing shirts Kanye had designed that read ‘white lives matter.’ Days later, Kanye followed this spectacle with a terrifying threat to Jewish people. Consistent with his embrace of Donald Trump a few years ago, Kanye is championing white-supremacist thought. (Misogyny is also a recurring theme in Kanye’s public statements about his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian.)

Perhaps Kanye believes he is a trickster, playing some clever game of subversion: Look, a Black man who champions whiteness! Maybe he thinks he is flipping the script on the notion that—as the late anti-colonial psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon put it—Black people live with a “third-person consciousness,” aware of being seen as a spectacular other. And maybe, even though we know mental illness does not map onto political ideologies and bigotries, Kanye is expressing his particular distress by acting out around matters of race, gender, and religion. There is evidence that unfettered incendiary ideas are one way that psychiatric distress can manifest. Or maybe he’s just a bigot who also doesn’t care much for his own people. We really don’t know.

What we do know is that the ideas Kanye is circulating are old, terrible, and powerful. They are death-dealing words. And whenever someone who is widely influential traffics in such ideas, there is cause for alarm.

The thing about ideologies of domination is that they aren’t individual possessions so much as accumulated beliefs and practices. Whether or not Kanye “means it” is inconsequential to the question of whether his words are harmful. They are.

And there are two distinct forms of harm taking place. One is the anti-Black racism directed towards members of his own group. In these moments, we might wonder about Kanye the way we wonder about conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker: How can you look in the mirror and maintain those beliefs? But that’s a private question. The broader impact of Kanye’s statements is the public matter, and we do better to focus there.

What makes matters worse is that when such pernicious, bigoted ideas come from a member of the reviled group, they serve to give cover to the much larger numbers of people who are not in the group and also hold bigoted views. Simply put, Kanye’s mouth is a blessing to racists. (The same can be said for Thomas and Walker.)

Even more troubling, racists may embrace Black people who exhibit anti-Blackness like these men—adore them, in fact—and believe that this absolves them of the sin of racism. It allows them to say, “Oh no, I don’t hate Black folks” out loud and silently mutter to themselves, “I only hate the ones who don’t hate other Black folks,” or, perhaps in more euphemistic language, “The reason I don’t like them isn’t because they’re Black, but because of how so many of them act.” These Black men rubber-stamp the caricatures they have made of themselves, and trade upon them individually while Black folks collectively suffer.

Then there is the harm Kanye directed towards members of another group that has experienced historic discrimination and genocide, as a Black man spewing vitriol on Jewish people. And this is where things get messier.

Kanye’s statements were unequivocally anti-semitic and unacceptable. Full stop. That said, Black people are sometimes put out by the demand that we discipline members of our own communities who behave in discriminatory ways when so often it feels as though other groups are hesitant to do so in defense of us. We are tempted to say (and sometimes do), “Call out your cousins first before you demand we rein in ours.” Better yet, vote them out of office, expel them from police forces, and fire them from schools. Simply put, stop handing power over to the ones who hate us most, because the consequences of their beliefs shape our daily lives.

I’ve noticed this reaction in some of the calls on social media for Black people—in particular—to disavow Kanye despite the fact that Black commentators are often his most vociferous critics. It seems that’s not enough. And it makes me want to ask: Who made him our responsibility when he belongs to the class of global, wealthy elites who live in rare air? We have enough problems of our own.

This frustration is compounded by a history of heightened focus on Black people’s bigotries (see for example the number of newspaper articles over the past 40 years about Black anti-Semitism and “Black-Korean conflict”), which is tied to the formulation that Black people should “know better” because we’ve experienced so much bigotry ourselves. That is an unfair expectation. Black people are not the moral beacons of the world, and we have those among us with politically objectionable opinions just like everyone else, including every other group of people who have been oppressed. Melanin is not impermeable to ideologies of domination.

What I find most instructive about this moment is that it is yet another sharp reminder that bigotries are not binaries; groups of people can’t be slotted into the simple categories of bad oppressor and virtuous oppressed. Bigotries instead aggregate into mountains of inequality, drawing energy from multiple sources. Leaked audio from last week, in which the Mexican American city-council president of Los Angeles and other political leaders displayed grotesque anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism, provided yet another example of this truth. An individual’s past and current experiences with bigotry are no barrier to projecting it onto one’s own people or others.

But here’s my point. Our attention shouldn’t rest solely, or even primarily, with the person who seems to, confusingly, embrace the thing that is wielded against him. We must maintain focus on the larger social reality and impact. As long as we are debating the minutiae of whether Kanye means what he says or why, our attention is far too narrow. We have millions of people in this country who overtly support the substance of what he says, and it is evident in their voting patterns and political commitments. Kanye, or Trump for that matter, may be forever banned from popular social media (and honestly I hope they are), and yet that will still be true. That’s the real terror and threat we live with.

I suppose I have fallen prey to the very thing I decry. I’m talking about Kanye. Worse still, I’m sure that’s what he wants. But at least I hope it’s clear that I’m not talking about him for him. I’m talking about him for us.