Recently there was a celebrated meeting in the Oval Office between the black musician Kanye West and the President of the United States of America, Donald Trump.
To set the scene, while it does not happen every day, it is not totally unheard of for the ‘leader of the free world’ to meet with eccentric cult-figures from the entertainment industry in the Oval Office. There was a celebrated meeting between President Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley during the Nixon era. Elvis, the Rock’n’Roll legend who rode on the back of ‘black’ music to fame and fortune but did not much like black people, had some wacky right-wing political ideas which he shared with the President, including a ‘revelation’ that the Beatles were ‘communist infiltrators’. He wanted to be given a US Marshall’s badge and appointed an ‘undercover agent’. The President indulged his antics the way one would indulge a favourite child, and even asked for his autograph and took a photograph with him in the office. Since an American President could do almost anything, Nixon gave him the badge. Whether he appointed him an undercover agent into the bargain is a detail that is not available on record.
Kanye West is a rap artist and producer who has achieved great fame in musical circles over the past two decades. On a Thursday in October, 2018, he paid a much publicized lunch-time visit to Donald Trump. As usual, Donald Trump was being pilloried in the regular press for his gaffes, his lies, and his tweets.
Kanye is a maverick artist who regularly says and does things to offend other people – artists, producers, the black community, some white musicians who he embarrasses at award ceremonies by going on stage to declare that someone else deserves the award more, and the general public. Controversy is never far from him. Despite all that, or in part because of it, he is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented musicians in the world, with a string of awards and recognitions rivalled by only few in history. Rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, fashion designer and entrepreneur, he has sold over 120 million albums worldwide and won 21 Grammy Awards. His net worth is estimated at $250 million dollars. And he is married to celebrity television personality Kim Kardashian.
On top of all this, and much to the chagrin of his hordes of fans in the black community, he is a great fan of Donald Trump. For his appointment at the White House, he wore Trump’s ‘MAGA’ cap (‘Make America Great Again’). At the high point of the visit to the visit, he moved over and hugged Trump.
‘I love this man’ he averred, to everyone who cared to listen.
As expected, the mere thought of a black musician in a genre of music that dwells on the ‘victimology’ of the black community embracing Donald Trump was enough to make the average African American puke, and the social media were set alight.
The irony of the embrace was not lost on many. Several years before then, during the Katrina hurricane and flood in New Orleans, Kanye West had been so incensed at the shoddy way black people were being treated by government and law enforcement agents, as well as the long time it took President GW Bush to rouse himself to pay a visit to the devastated victims that he made the famous statement ‘Bush does not like black people’.
To the black community, George W Bush indeed was a choir boy by comparison with Donald Trump. How it must have made the blood of many activists of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ boil in anger!
Kanye West literally took control of the meeting during his audience in the White House. The President, not known to be a great listener to anything, sat quietly for the most part, his hands on the desk, listening as Kanye delivered a wide-ranging monologue on topics from the need to change the 13th Amendment of US Constitution to the virtues of his new line of sneakers.
‘Trump is on his hero’s journey right now,‘ he said. ‘He might not have thought he’d have a crazy person like me…’
He was referring here not just to the fact that people might find his familiarity with Donald Trump odd, but also to the nervous breakdown that he had for which he had been hospitalized. There was still argument about whether the admission had been voluntary or he had been compelled to go in willy-nilly because of his disturbed behavior. More recently, when critics have questioned some of his behavior, he has been quick to say that he did not really suffer a nervous breakdown but was merely sleep-deprived.
The love affair between the Donald Trump White House and the black rapper has been showing signs of cooling somewhat since the visit. Trump’s image-laundry machine in the black community was going to feature Kanye in a prominent role. He backed out of the role, complaining that he felt he was being ‘used’.
That was not, of course, to imply that the black boy had abandoned Trump.
Some loud voices in the African American community have advocated a boycott of Kanye West’s music and his clothing and other business.
Clearly Kanye West is a black man with what would be called ‘right wing’ views.
Unfortunately, there is an ugly kernel of truth in some of what he and the few other black ‘right wingers’ who have dared to raise their heads above the parapet are saying. White men kill black men, which is ugly, and must be stopped. But black men also kill black men, which is ugly too, and must be stopped. Far more black men are killed by other black men in the hotbeds of gang violence in Chicago and other places than those killed by white men on a daily basis. People – especially men need to take responsibility for parenting and should not just bear children and abandon them to a life of violence and drugs and early death in the inner-city streets, in a manner reminiscent of the almajiri menace in northern Nigeria, and just as deadly.
These are not popular truths to say in the black community, but someone has to have the courage to say them, otherwise there would be no real change. A whole race cannot, in any case, follow one political direction because politics and change are also driven from within. Blacks and Asians in the UK have discovered that they cannot and should not all vote ‘Labour’, as they have traditionally done. Some – especially among the younger generation, have become pillars of the Conservative party. A strong black presence in the Republican party in the USA will not only empower black people but help to drive the racist core to the fringe and beyond. A historical nugget many are not aware of is that Abraham Lincoln, who took America into a civil war to abolish slavery, was a ‘Republican’, and, long ago, the ‘Democrats’ were actually the slave-owners.
Kanye West – the troubled young black man dreams some day of becoming the President of America. It can reasonably be assumed that he would want to do it as a Republican. He is not winning any popularity contests in the black ghettoes now, and many people frankly hate his guts, but who knows what the future holds.
