As a journalist, blogger, and interpreter of current events, I’ve witnessed many incredible moments. The ones that have created a lasting impact, positive or negative, forced me to pause, reassess and do one of two things: double-down on my support or do an about-face to leave that item, or person, behind. This week’s impactful event, regrettably, was made possible by Kanye West.

The 40-year-old rapper, producer, fashion designer and all-around media provocateur created a few ripples in social media, first by breaking his self-imposed circa-2016 Twitter sabbatical by proclaiming admiration and loyalty to our nation’s president. When I saw the photos of Kanye rocking the “MAGA” trucker cap, my ‘Spidey-senses’ tingled and the side-eye twitched, but hey. My usual stance with religion and politics is ‘live and let live.’ But when West surfaced on TMZ Live Tuesday afternoon and proclaimed to the hosts that, “When you hear about slavery—for 400 years? That sounds like a choice,” it went from he’s just ‘doin’ Kanye’ to simply, ‘Kanye’s doing too much.’

As Harvey Levin, who’s Jewish, and Charles Latibeaudiere, an African-American, looked on in stunned silence, Kanye—-who also admitted to going off of three prescribed medications and purposely only taking “one or two of them a week”—-tried to backpedal the statement and compare our ancestors’ generational captivity to being “mentally in prison.” But by then the damage was done.

Another TMZ Live co-host, Van Lathan, immediately stood up and checked his ignorance: “I think what you’re doing right now [demonstrates] an absence of thought. Kanye, you’re entitled to your opinion…. but there is fact and real world, real life consequences to everything you just said. While you are….being an artist and living the life that you’ve earned by being a genius, the rest of us in society have to deal with these threats to our lives [and] with the marginalization that has come from the 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was a ‘choice.’ Frankly, I’m disappointed, I’m appalled and Brother….I am unbelievingly hurt.”

That explosive exchange marked the beginnings of the backlash. Film director, Ava Duvernay, characterized his and R. Kelly’s tendencies to compare the consequences of their “dastardly behavior” to lynchings as “stratospheric in [its] audacity and ignorance.” Musician John Legend, West’s longtime friend, collaborator and one-time protégé, unfollowed Kanye on social media. And echoing what many knew already from factual accounts and common sense, Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill responded on Twitter with, “There was NEVER a moment in history where Black people didn’t resist slavery. Some did it by jumping off ships. Some killed masters. Some ran away. Some did it through everyday forms of resistance. Slave masters didn’t retire. Our resistance led to our freedom.”

There was even a hashtag we blacks created, #ifslaverywasachoice, which mocks the absurdities in Kanye’s assertion that our people voluntarily remained in a subjugated state, as 3/5s of a human being, bred like livestock and stripped away from our homelands, languages, religions, customs and traditions, to get whipped, raped, hung and lynched as part of America’s unpaid labor force. Even Black Panther’s villain, N’Jadaka/Erik “Killmonger”Stevens, understood enough of slavery’s horrors to embrace dying over imprisonment: “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ‘cause they knew death was better than bondage.”

Marvel Studios’ BLACK PANTHER
Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan)
Credit: Matt Kennedy/©Marvel Studios 2018

I was a Kanye West fan for years. I don’t get the appeal of his fashion line or his wife, but still, I was down with West…..that is, until, he negated the calculated deliberations of America’s white forefathers’ in legislating laws to enact centuries of cruelty against us and framed the consequences as something we willfully allowed.

I can’t diagnose him, and I can’t educate him…..but I did click ‘unfollow.’ And sure, give Kanye the credit on this one…..it was certainly my choice.