Kanye West: A White Person’s Guide

Dearest Karen and Chet,

Kanye West is the logical conclusion of what happens white supremacy clashes head first into mental illness.

He’s what happens when the same white people who villainized him come to accept him into their families with open arm. He is one of the greatest artist of this generation who has the misfortune of being called the greatest, even at a time he wasn’t producing his greatest music.

He’s the specter of white acceptance, given human and allowed to roam free, without anyone there to take him aside and show him the kind of care he needs.

Kanye West is a man dying in front of us all, long before his body stops moving.

And yes, Karen, Kanye West is the Taylor Swift guy.

When I think back to where the downfall of Kanye West begins, I really do think it started with Kanye West, a black man, “attacking” Taylor Swift at the VMAs. West, by the way, wasn’t wrong; Beyonce really did have one of the best music videos of all time, at a point when music videos were basically dying. His righteous indignation at Swift’s win and defense of Beyonce’s legacy was rooted in the right place, even if it was the product of having one drink too many.

But the image that stuck in your minds, Chet and Karen, was that of a black entertainer threatening a white entertainer’s credibility. Back in those heady days, Taylor Swift was still firmly entrenched as “America’s Sweetheart”, back when the old Taylor wasn’t dead and you could think about Taylor Swift without also having to think about what Taylor represented. And no, Chet, I don’t know why Taylor stopped making country music, other than the fact that no one really makes country music anymore.

White people and black people alike were quick to jump on Kanye, white people because protecting white women from black men is both their favorite national past time and also the subject of the favorite genre of pornography. Black people mostly didn’t get what the big deal was, since the VMAs have been and always will be bullshit and utterly unimportant. Even the President called Kanye a jackass. It was bad times for Kanye all around, and it was a time that I think shaped the man he is today.

I’d be ignoring a huge aspect of Kanye’s story if I didn’t mention the death of his mother Donda West, which I (and other black people) don’t think Kanye ever recovered from. The thing about black moms is that they can be such a grounding force in their children’s lives. Lots of black people lose it when their moms or Big Mommas or aunties pass away, as if a sun went nova and the solar system no longer has a proper axis. Grieving while black is hard enough. White supremacy is such a burden that we often feel as though they only thing we can do is keep moving forward. We ball the sadness and the despair and we throw it in a corner and say “I’ll deal with you later, I have to pay the white man’s utility bills and he won’t give a shit if I need to cry it out.”

Grieving while black and a celebrity? It’s functionally impossible.

Kanye’s mental illness is debated and disputed among black people: some of us see him as a narcissistic assclown hiding his douchebag tendencies behind a bullshit diagnosis none of us confirm, others see classic signs of stress and trauma tearing apart a soul so obviously in need for help they can’t understand why someone who claims to love him won’t give it to him. (The answer to that seems to be that his family is essentially powerless to do anything during times like this.) The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, as with all things.

I can tell you that white people and black people have dealt with mental illness in different ways, and that, as always, society tends to rise up afflicted white people while looking down on afflicted black people. When Karen’s son bit a kid and throw a bag of dirt in a girl’s face and call his math teacher the C-word, the school tried to give her as many resources to “fix” her son as possible before they’d even consider letting her go. In America, your black child with a mental illness can literally can be sent to jail for not doing homework on time.

So black parents took to trying to whoop or scold ADHD and bipolar disorder and mental handicaps out of their kids, only to find out that they just raised children who grow up to be angry, bitter, and still dealing with all their ailments.

At any rate, I think Kanye West spent one or maybe two years in the wilderness, dealing with the horseshit fallout of suggesting that a black woman’s music video was better than a white woman’s (in an age where MTV had already pivoted to making as much cheap, trash reality TV as possible because it turns out no one needs a network devoted to music videos when you can just watch that shit on YouTube). He released another critically acclaimed album, but he never quite was able to wash off that stench.

Grieving and mental illness are a toxic combination, Karen and Chet. Add celebrity to the mix and it becomes even more dangerous. Add being a black celebrity and it becomes straight up poisonous.

This is because, perhaps even moreso than white people, black people figure that those who made it out of their circumstances and emerged as wealthy and comfortable no long have a reason to act out. They have an obligation to show up in front of the world as shiny beacons of blackness, unecumbered by poverty, having “made it” in a white world. When someone like Kanye West shows up and in his mania decides to declare that slavery was a choice or that Harriet Tubman didn’t really free slaves, it is so easy to simply dismiss them outright.

And that happens because we as black people feel that once you have the same money, access and power that white people do, you have no excuses to not get right. The narrative surrounding Kanye West from the black community is one of tired exhaustion, as his occasional steps into hotepery (again, please, do not use this word) only serve to harm both our view of him and his every growing addiction to some sort of white acceptance.

When Kanye West declared he was running for President, white journalists tripped all over themselves to both participate in the humiliation of a black man and treat his entry into the rest as a legitimate political news story. That Kanye can not and could not articulate anything that sounded like an actual campaign platform didn’t matter, in much the same way that Donald Trump’s only platform being “be as racist as possible” was propped up by the media. In so doing, they gave West’s mania fueled decision making validity. All while black people, who are so, so damn tired of having to try and defend this man bounced in droves.

The phrase “mental illness isn’t an excuse to be an asshole” gets bandied about a lot. And on the one hand, it seems like a perfectly plausible way of thinking. It sounds like excuse making, as though we are letting someone off the hook for misbehaving. That idea that the only way to curb mental illness is by shouting it down and beating it into submission, figuratively or literally, permeates the black experience and the experiences of people of color.

As someone who is coping with anxiety, I can empathize with how Kanye’s probably feeling; knowing in some way that what he’s doing something out of the ordinary, while his mind is simultaneously convincing him what he’s doing is right and making himself feel guilty about it. It’s an experience that people who don’t normally deal with mental illness can’t understand.

You make a decision, and then you make judgments about your decision, and you enter a thought spiral of self-doubt and loathing, all while attempting to justify the thing you did to people who don’t understand or to yourself. Your mind doesn’t stop running, trying to come up with a solution to a problem where a problem can’t exist. You try to control the uncontrollable, then get upset that you can’t control the uncontrollable, then get mad that you’re mad that you can’t control the uncontrollable because it is literally uncontrollable, and then get mad that you realize the uncontrollable is uncontrollable but you can’t control you brain and convince it to see that the thing you want to control is uncontrollable.

I think that is ultimately why Kanye West keeps making overtures to white people, and why he keeps saying things the will only satisfy white ears. They feed into that feeling that he is in control when he’s not. They tell him his run for the Presidency is legitimate when it’s not. They ask him for his opinions on politics when he doesn’t have any (or when he does but can’t really articulate it because his mind if moving at a million miles an hour). Donald Trump says he loves him and so Kanye feels like he can control how the President feels. He puts out albums that are incomprehensible and poorly mixed, especially in relation to his older works, as a form of control. He refuses to take his medicine because “it makes him less creative”, when he legit is one of the most creative artists of all time.

Black people telling him he’s an irrational jackass have only made his desire to control as much as he can stronger. And the irony is, we tell people like Kanye West, and Lauryn Hill, and pre-Crisis Dave Chappelle, and D’Angelo, and any number of successful black people struggling with mental illness of all forms, that they should behave themselves…as a form of control ourselves.

It’s a collective form of black anxiety. The feeling that any black person who acts out is going to make us all look bad, so we’ve got to stomp out anyone who misbehaves in front of white folks, to prevent white folks from doing us more harm. White supremacy has hardened all of our hearts and minds. We can’t and won’t suffer fools gladly, even when they need us the most. We have to suck it up. Be sick on someone else’s times.

You can draw a line from the 15-year-old girl with ADHD who ends up in juvenile detention because she violated her probation by not doing her homework, Kanye West being called a bag of dicks because he can’t put his mental illness on pause when it’s convenient for people, and the countless black people who end up either locked up or wandering around homeless, cast out by a society all too eager to cast them out for not being able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”.

Saying that’s unfair is an understatement. Saying that’s a result of white supremacy is just the truth.

Kanye West isn’t the best human alive. He’s said some harmful-as-fuck things. At times he seems indefensible. But I wish we all could talk about him without talking about the fuck up things he’s done, and instead talking about the systems and policies and mentality him in the situation he’s in. America has done a pretty poor job of taking care of the people that BUILT*CLAP*THIS*CLAP*JOINT*CLAP*FOR*CLAP*FREE.

That’s a lot that white people have to atone for. Hopefully understanding who Kanye West is will make you less likely to hate on the next black artist who’s struggling.

In short…I miss the old Kanye, like a lot of people do. The amount of insight and humor in a song like “Through the Wire” has all but disappeared.

But maybe we could all do a little better job of trying to help and understand the new Kanye.

Sincerely,

Your black friend.