By shelz

Heavy is the head that wears the repentant crown; especially when that head normally runs rampant with narcissism. Pushing those feelings of extreme entitlement aside for the good graces of a fan base that has grown weary of your episodes of arrogance and conceit has to be difficult. When you can’t help yourself and these instances keep coming, that task becomes inordinately harder.

Last year’s VMA’s marked Kanye’s tipping point; the moment when the tantrums outweighed the talent.  The Hip-Hop world breathed a heavy sigh and condemned his marring of Taylor Swift’s special moment, then went on to poke fun at the incident, repeating the famous line over and over again.

“Imma let you finish, but….”

Then we moved on, wondering how West was going to squiggle out of his most recent PR pickle, knowing he would be back sooner or later.  We had seen and forgiven worse, but other segments of the population weren’t as accepting.  The stench of racism reared its ugly head and plenty of websites were bombarded with bigotry and intolerance. To them he wasn’t some overly spoiled artist having another moment of ridiculous self-importance, he was a n****r ripe for lynching.  That is what they said.  That is what they meant.  The remarks were on a level of vile we hadn’t seen in a while and deflated that unrealistic idea of a post racial America we had been hearing so much about around that time.

That idea of an e-lynching came full circle on Wednesday when Mr. West suggested during an interview with Angie Martinez that his treatment at the hands of the internet racists was similar to an historic atrocity that still haunts our public conscience: the murder of Emmett Till.

In 1955 Till was ferociously beaten, tortured, shot and thrown in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.  He was weighted down with a cotton gin fan that was tied around his neck with barbed wire and his eye was gouged out. The appalling crime was then sealed into our collective memory when his mother chose to have an open casket at his funeral so everyone could see the depravity of the crime.  Wondering what the last few hours of his life were like is too difficult for most people to do. That difficulty is compounded tenfold for most parents because Till was an innocent 14-year-old child. Till’s face was marred beyond recognition and the picture taken of him resting lifeless in his coffin is one of the most jarring and repugnant photographs of the 20^th century.

The picture burned into my mind from the night of Kanye’s fall from grace is him standing on the red carpet pouring liquor down Amber Rose’s throat.  It’s not quite the same.

I see where he was going with this statement, I do. There is no denying the free flowing prejudice that accompanied the outrage of his stage rush. West was the victim of some slow simmering resentment spawned by plenty of things he had nothing to do with that boiled over in the face of his hubris.  However, his absurd comparison makes it obvious that his feelings of entitlement still hover in the range of delusional hyperbole.

West’s disconnect from the true pain and violence of pre-civil rights movement racism isn’t unique though.  Plenty of the children of the civil rights generation live their lives as they do because of the commitment the previous generation had to the cause, but don’t connect their parents’ sacrifice to the allowances they enjoy.  Everything Mr. West does makes news and is summarily analyzed though.  Most of us have our ignorance confined to the comfort of our own homes.

Is his statement as horrible as everyone thinks it is?  Yes, it really is. But West’s statement echoes the thinking of many who have yet to reconcile the rapes, shootings, stabbings, bombings and lynching of that time with a Black artist’s newfound ability to sit next to a white country singer, let alone snatch her mic and not get buried on the side of the road for it .

I’d suggest Mr. West do some research on pre-civil rights movement race relations in this country and try to really understand the gravity of what he said. He also needs to realize people spewing hatred on the web doesn’t even begin to compare to the tragic and wicked death of a child who did absolutely nothing wrong. Then again, if he’s pressed for time between fashion house internships and shows at Facebook, he could always do a Michael Jackson tribute.  We all know there is no faster way to turn the tide of ugly public opinion.

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