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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36584 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I don't even disagree with many of those potential nuggets (empires do have systems to assimilate people and make them accept it, apathy is a thing, we today have been sapped of a certain amount of...I dunno, feeling of control over the destiny of our civilizations?). But that's not what Kanye said.

I think it is.

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years,” he said. “For 400 years? That sounds like a choice. You was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all. It’s like we’re mentally in prison. I like the word prison because slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks. Slavery is to blacks as the Holocaust is to Jews. Prison is something that unites as one race, blacks and whites, that we’re the human race.”

Perhaps this is necessary context. This is from New Slaves, on the album Yeezus -

My mama was raised in the era when,

Clean water was only served to the fairer skin,

Doin' clothes, you woulda thought I had help,

But they wasn't satisfied unless I picked the cotton myself,

You see it's broke nigga racism

That's that "Don't touch anything in the store",

And it's rich nigga racism

That's that "Come in, please buy more",

"What you want, a Bentley? Fur coat? A diamond chain?

All you blacks want all the same things",

Used to only be niggas, now everybody playin'

Spendin' everything on Alexander Wang

New slaves

He's not saying "they only like us when we are rich", he's saying they distract us from the pursuit of freedom with material possessions and with racial prejudice, pitting us against each other so we don't notice them pulling our strings.

He's said similar things in interviews with people like Joe Rogan (and I thought Candace Owens too, but I can't find any interviews between them, google just shows me a billion opinion pieces bitching about the both of them.)

The fact that any order comes up with social systems to take up some of the work of force doesn't mean that force isn't lurking, isn't a dominant consideration in people's minds or that force isn't actually effective.

Exactly. You don't need to whip them every day because they have been mentally enslaved, the fear of the whip, of lynching and brutality keeps them in line. Even after slavery was abolished. The first step in freeing yourself from mental slavery is to say "I would rather die free than live as a slave" and to mean it.

You keep calling it banal, but you aren't explaining why. If it's so obvious and unoriginal, why is everyone flipping out? Why are you explaining exactly what he means as if it is somehow a rebuttal of what he said?

It is a God damned fucking atrocity that black people were so terrorised and brutalised by slavers that it has instilled such a horrible and depressive mindset into them, but agency is agency - you can only be given so much freedom, primarily you have to take it for yourself. And when someone is beaten down so much that they accept living in poverty, they need to be shocked into action, because gentle sympathy just excuses them from trying.

Like Bill Cosby said, it is the soft bigotry of lowered expectations. And we do it to everybody living around the poverty line these days. I don't know if you are dismissing it as "stupid" and "bootstraps" because you are enslaved or because living in poverty is too alien for you to understand and you think middle class sensibilities should be respected at all times, but I strongly disagree.

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