Rapper, designer, and self-proclaimed avatar of “dragon energy” Kanye West caused controversy yesterday when he told the entertainment site TMZ that American slavery was a “choice.”
“When you hear about slavery for 400 years … for 400 years?” he said. “That sounds like a choice.”
He later doubled down in a perplexing tweetstorm that included, among other things, an apocryphal quote likely falsely attributed to Harriet Tubman implying that enslaved people did not know they were slaves.
I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman
West’s contention that slavery was a choice represents the intersection of decades’ worth of revisionist Civil War history with the “bootstrap” narrative of personal responsibility embedded in American culture. West’s latest viral message, in other words, is the culmination of tropes far older than he.
he first cultural trope West is embracing here is that of the “happy slave”: the enslaved person whose situation is, if not consensual, then nonetheless not really that bad. It’s a narrative we can find in fiction everywhere from Gone With the Wind to Song of the South.This narrative isn’t limited to fiction. Generations of high school textbooks have elided the scale, scope, and significance of slavery, recharacterizing the Civil War as an internecine squabble over “states’ rights” rather than a war over the right to own slaves. (For an extensive discussion on why the Civil War was not, in fact, about states’ rights, check out Emily Badger’s excellent piece at the Pacific Standard.)
In Texas in 2015, for example, a social studies textbook used in public schools made headlines when it informed students, “The Atlantic Slave Trade between the 1500s and 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations,” implying that enslaved people were “workers” traveling of their own volition,along with white indentured laborers.
In practice, this means that the brutality and reach of slavery tends to be both underemphasized and undertaught in American public schools. A 2018 study by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project found that Civil War literacy among high school students was catastrophically low. Just 8 percent of high school seniors said slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. Only 44 percent knew that slavery was legal in all colonies during the American Revolution, and fewer than half knew that a constitutional amendment had formally ended slavery.
But West’s comments need to be viewed in another light too. His insistence that slavery is a choice needs to be understood in the context that for so much of American cultural history, everything is seen as a choice. The capitalist, individualist narrative of “personal responsibility” as a defining feature of the American cultural ethos is one that underpins nearly every American cultural institution.
Economically, we can see it in the ideology of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps celebrated in everything from the 19th-century novels of Horatio Alger to GOP talking points. Religiously, we can see it in distinctively American crazes like the Victorian era’s New Thought and the popularity of the Christian prosperity gospel, which implies that your piety directly impacts your pocketbook. It’s the ideology that underpins our Gwyneth Paltrow-inspired fantasies of “wellness,” our obsessive gym culture, and capitalist “empowerment” complexes like the skin care industry. Physically, spiritually, socially, we are — as a nation — fantasists of control.
It’s a trope that is also fiercely individualistic. It has little time for, say, structural inequality, or any -ism that might encroach on the total autonomy of a self that wants to, well, self-improve.
see link for a whole lot more smart stuff
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