What Kanye Said and What to Do About It

Tricia Rose, director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown and author of The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop — and Why It Matters  (Civitas Books, 2008), talks about the controversial comments made by Kanye West on slavery sounding like a choice. 

"If we follow Kanye’s logic then basically status quo of domination is meant to be because anyone who doesn’t end their own oppression is complicit," says @ProfTriciaRose. "It’s a justification of domination and those who are in power and allowing that to continue."

— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) May 4, 2018

And listeners weighed in:

Kanye doesn’t read. It’s appalling that his mother was a professor of African American History and here’s the kind ignorance he’s spewing. He’s selling a product. Recognize it and walk away.

— Violhaine2.0 (@Violhaine2_0) May 4, 2018

The caller who identified herself as an African-American Gen-Xer hit the nail on the head — West is a fool, Trump’s a racist code-caller, and this whole episode shows how ahistorical and sidetracked this society continues to be.

— Eric Jon Wagner (@wagnerworkshop) May 4, 2018

The real problem is education. There is no real education on what really happened during those 400 years.

— Ayo (@BrooklynAyo) May 4, 2018