This story is adapted from Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future, by Brandi Collins-Dexter.

When it’s all said and done, remember the fearless, remember the dreamers, remember those who represent the ghetto .… the fairy tale of nothing to something. … I can hear you screaming “Color inside the lines!!!” Well fuck your coloring book, color by numbers approach to life. At the end of the day who are we hurting??? Oh “The new Black???” Since Barack is president Blacks don’t like fur coats, red leather, and fried chicken anymore?! When you truly understand cultural settings, boundaries, and our modern day caste systems, then you can feel the glory and pain from the days of kings in Africa to the new kings of the media. Let the ball players dance after they score! It’s life my niggas, it's life! Remember clothing is a choice. We were born naked!!! Fresh is an opinion, love is objective, taste is selective, and expression is my favorite elective. No more politics or apologies!!!

 —Kanye West

With Kanye, I am never really sure if I’m bearing witness to a public breakdown or a breakthrough. He is unpalatable to the mainstream, irresistible to the masses. He has a persona that is perfect for the age of internet celebrity. He gives an authentic, if imperfect, voice to trauma for our disaffected generation. But there is a cost to breaking decorum.

Ever have one of those agonizing moments when you feel like you’re watching a car wreck play out in front of you and you keep saying “Oh no, oh no” while the driver spins out of control? That’s how I felt watching the infamous clip of Kanye West on TMZ Live in 2018. Yes, this is the clip in which Kanye gives the sound bite that would break the internet: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years? That sounds like a choice. You were there for 400 years, and it is all of y’all? It is like we are mentally in prison.”

My first thought was that Kanye was not the same man he had once been. The man who, over a decade earlier, during Hurricane Katrina, had cut through the bullshit pretense of civility and spoken up, saying “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” That Kanye—2005 Kanye—was someone who spoke to me and for me. He spoke to many other people. But 2018 Kanye on TMZ saying slavery was a choice? Nah, he could keep that one. What had happened in the intervening years? What had changed?

For some, “slavery was a choice” translated to a statement on the inherent dumbness of Black people in America. The implication is we were willing participants in our own physical enslavement. For others, it showed the inherent dumbness of Kanye and his eagerness to be a tool of the Trump show. In hindsight, both of these conclusions are flawed.

Look, I can admit it’s a weird fucking sound bite and definitely the wrong venue and audience for that conversation. It’s one of those things you say when you’re the controversial cousin at the family Easter dinner. Not during a performative spectacle at the offices of a company that specializes in trashy gossip.

But there’s nuance to what Kanye’s saying, especially when taken in the context of his tweets the next day explaining that by “choice,” he was referring more to mental than physical enslavement.

Of course, I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved. The reason why I brought up the 400 years point is we can’t be mentally imprisoned for another 400 years. We need free thought now. Even the statement was an example of free thought. It was just an idea. We are programmed to always talk and fight race issues. We need to update our conversation.

There’s a lot in this that’s true, in particular, the fact that mental terror was inflicted upon Black communities to keep those enslaved subservient. So in that way, Kanye was right about mental enslavement being able to do a lot of work that physical enslavement alone could not do. He was right about the impact of psychological abuse.

Where I and so many others took issue with his comments is that it’s a dangerous and false idea to suggest if you cannot break the binds of psychological terrorism, it’s because you’re a mentally weak person. That is just another way to pathologize Black people and blame us for slavery’s evilness. So I’m not feeling the comments for that reason. But I want to understand what he was actually trying to articulate.

Days later, Kanye further clarified his statements by visiting Black radio and media personality Charlamagne tha God. Charlamagne got straight to it, asking Kanye what he was thinking and pushing him to provide more context:

Kanye West: We definitely are dealing with racism. But I want to push future concepts. … It’s like … all the slave movies … why you gotta keep reminding us about slavery? Why don’t you … put Michael Jordan on a 20-dollar bill [instead of Harriet Tubman]?

Charlamagne: But Harriet Tubman was a slave who rebelled, though. Like, her and Nat Turner had a different frequency … They were like you were; you said you didn’t feel like being controlled.

Kanye West: Man … I know this is gonna cause an uproar, but certain icons is just too far in the past and not relatable. And [that’s] what makes them safe. Like, they’ll let you go on the Grammys and talk about slavery and all that, and racism, because it’s not talking about buying stock; it’s not talking about buying property.

As a Kanye-whisperer, I feel relatively confident that what he’s saying here is the constant showcasing of Black trauma as the main story about Black people is another form of psychological warfare. And I agree with him about this. For example, research suggests Black people—and people of color in general—experience long-term mental health effects from frequent exposure to the graphic videos of police killings circulated online.

The experience of watching those videos, combined with the lived experience of racism, can create severe psychological problems: heightened fear, anxiety, and distrust of the people around you. Research also shows repeated exposure to violent videos in general and Black death specifically makes people numb to others’ pain and suffering. During George Floyd’s murder trial, the defense attorney played the footage of the last moments of Floyd’s life over and over. There are several reasons why he claimed to have done this, but one purpose it served was to bombard the jury with an onslaught of images that would desensitize them to Floyd’s death. Desensitize and dehumanize, leading them to forget they were seeing the unnatural snuffing out of someone’s life. For me, it’s chilling to process that.

I recognize that white people often perpetuate the constant media loop of Black trauma in the name of acknowledging Black pain. But whatever the motivation, the impact is disempowerment. It reinforces a narrative that Blackness is something undesirable, unsafe, and subhuman.

If Blackness is assumed inherently traumatic, built solely on the memory of enslavement and murder, then there is no room for Black nostalgia and the resulting comfort and pride. There is no room to embrace the complexity, nuance, and joy of present-day Black existence. Nor is there room to work toward a Black future free of trauma because it’s hard to even begin to imagine what that could look like. It becomes easier to imagine Black extinction than it does Black liberation. Easier to imagine Black pain than Black joy.

I often fear that in our collective memory and story, we have stripped all of the beauty from Blackness. In front of the white gaze and through the white gaze, to be Black is to be brutalized. And because there are so few Black media outlets left to tell and celebrate our stories in our own voices, the dominant narrative persists that to be Black is to be disempowered, that to be Black is to be lynched. It took a Black media outlet—in this case, The Breakfast Club—to draw that deeper contemplation and nuance out of Kanye.

When we make Blackness something we have to rise above, Blackness becomes a traumatic bonding experience that is temporal, hard, and eventually hateful. In some ways, this is what Kanye was voicing in his TMZ interview—the all-too-real ways that a narrative of trauma can be harmful. In Kanye’s statements to Charlamagne, we can see his embrace of “making America great again” as an attempt to reclaim, for Black people, a positive view of the past. We need a different version of Black history, built from the stories that don’t make the front pages of The New York Times or TMZ’s website.

In 2019, Kanye released the gospel album, Jesus Is King, on themes of imperfection, liberation, salvation, and new birth. The lead single for the album was “Follow God.” The video for the song starts with Kanye walking in the snow in front of his father, Ray, on the artist’s expansive Wyoming property. We hear a voiceover from his father asking what it really means to follow God and meditating on having a child follow in your footsteps.

In the video, though, Ray is following Kanye. It’s almost as though Kanye is saying, “I tried things your way, now we’re going to do things my way.” This image echoes his political choices and radical statements. For decades, Black voters have walked in the steps of those who chose the Democratic Party; Kanye is saying: I am trying a new direction because what’s been done before no longer serves me or us as Black voters. Regardless of whether the video’s message is that direct, it’s a meditation on his relationship with his heritage and past—what he owes to those who came before and how he’ll choose his own path forward.

The video ends with the written words: “My dad came to visit me at one of our ranches in Cody, Wyoming. He talked about his love for fishing and how we would like to come here in the summers. It took me 42 years to realize that my dad was my best friend. He asked me, ‘How many acres is this?’ I told him 4,000. He replied with these three words: ‘A Black man?’”

Four thousand is a reference to the 40 acres Black people were supposed to receive as reparations and start-up seed investment after the US Civil War, reparations that were never fully distributed. Kanye seems to be saying, we never got our 40 acres, but on my own, I amassed 100 times that amount.

In the early 1900s, Kanye’s family was located in Oklahoma, a land of opportunity for Black people. When Kanye’s grandfather, Portwood Williams, was born, Oklahoma had 50 all-Black towns, more than existed in any other state. At the center was Tulsa, home to what Booker T. Washington proudly proclaimed “Black Wall Street.” The district was founded by one of the first Black self-made millionaires—O. W. Gurley—and was widely considered to be one of the wealthiest Black neighborhoods in the south.

In 1921, when Portwood was seven, the idyllic Black Wall Street was attacked by an angry white lynch mob in what came to be known as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Over 300 Black people were murdered, and 35 blocks and the businesses on them were burned to the ground. As a young boy, Portwood worked shining shoes, bringing home his money to help pay the bills but also keeping a little for himself. As an adult, he launched an upholstery business, finding success and ultimately being honored as one of Oklahoma City’s outstanding Black businessmen.

In 1958, Portwood took his young children to what became a three-day sit-in at the Katz Drug Store lunch counter in downtown Oklahoma City. It wasn’t enough just to quietly build his own success; he had to move beyond self-interest and make demands for broader power as well. He wanted to show what it meant to be successful—on one’s own terms and with autonomy—as a Black man. Portwood and his wife, Lucille, had four children: Shirlie, Klaye, Portwood Jr., and Donda, Kanye’s mother. They would instill in them a strong work ethic, steely determination, unshakable faith in God, and commitment to civil rights.

When you consider this history, Kanye’s frame of mind begins to make more sense. The Williams family has persisted toward a vision of autonomy even in the face of overwhelmingly violent racism. For Kanye, it’s led him down a path of seeking agency and power through often iconoclastic methods: “We’re going to do things my way now.” It’s why those 4,000 acres mean so much to him and his father.

This movement is bigger and older than Kanye. In 1895, at the Atlanta Exposition, Booker T. Washington gave a speech that would become known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” In front of a mostly white crowd, Washington urged Black people to avoid confrontation with white people over segregation or political or social equity and instead focus on building independent Black economic security. His argument was this: Black people needed to create their own fate and fortune, independent of their white surroundings.

Over a century after that speech, this DIY framework of Black economic autonomy has persisted in Black political thought. In few places has this been clearer than the resurgence of Black economist Thomas Sowell in surprising online spaces. Sowell is a prolific writer and a leader of conservative-libertarian thought. Central to his ideology, Sowell sees the combination of federal aid and racialized rhetoric as a gateway drug to neutralize the working class and compromise Black family values, community economics, and sustainability. The enemy is not conservatism, Sowell proclaims, but liberal intellectuals, celebrities, and politicians who hide behind platitudes and create ivory towers around public knowledge and free exchange of thought.

He has been name-checked by people ranging from January 6 insurrectionist Nick Fuentes to—you guessed it—Kanye West. Kanye’s tweets about Sowell have been a gateway to modern alternative Black conservative thought anchored in a pro-Black agenda. This was something, too, that Kanye voiced that day on The Breakfast Club after the TMZ incident: “Yeah, it’s not talking about economic power. You can complain as hard as you want [about racism], but it’s not scary [like talking about economic empowerment].”

While most Black voters are well aware that racists occupy both sides of the political aisle, 90 percent of us have chosen to take our chances on the less obvious racists in the Democratic Party. But Kanye is part of a growing group of Black voters reminiscent of those who sought to build the Black Wall Street. That Booker T. Washington shit. That Thomas Sowell groove. The political identity of those optimists who left the South in droves, looking to build a new community free from the tyranny of a Confederate government and believing they could do so without interference from white people.

In other words, under what seems like misguided and inflammatory bluster about Trump and slavery, Kanye is offering a radical vision for the future: one premised on the idea of building our own wealth, valuing our own intellect, and cultivating our own sanctuary for Black creativity and power. In other words: 

When you truly understand cultural settings, boundaries, and our modern day caste systems, then you can feel the glory and pain from the days of kinds in Africa to the new kings of the media.

Maybe the new Kanye isn’t so different from the old Kanye after all.

This essay is adapted from Black Skinhead: Reflections on Blackness and Our Political Future, by Brandi Collins-Dexter. The book will be published this month by Celadon Books.