Scott Woods: Kanye West and the Distraction of Racism

Toni Morrison once said, “The very serious function of racism … is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.” In an ideal situation, we would eschew the distraction altogether. We would go about our days living our best lives, so immersed in the beauty and rewards of our culture and neighbors and lovers that it would never occur to us to care what racists think or do.

Morrison was one of the most brilliant people this country has ever produced. Not brilliant Black people. Not brilliant writer. Not brilliant woman. Brilliant person. And if you listen to her speeches and read her essays, you realize she understands that this notion—that racism is a distraction—is just that: It’s an idea, and not without exception. We all know that one person of color who seems to go through life intentionally unaffected by the racism around them, not out of ignorance, but out of purpose. That is often a beautiful person to behold. But we also know it’s not a state of being in which most of us exist.

Such a state can be attained in small doses, but we’re not even close to utilizing that tool as a social reality. We simply don’t live in a world prepared for that level of sea change when it comes to race. It is a defense that must be built up over time, a tool we must learn to use, a muscle we must work with great repetition and increasing focus in order to protect ourselves. Living a life even half-distracted by race takes a lot of work.

It doesn’t help that people sometimes twist Morrison’s quote to mean that one’s color should be ignored. At this point, I hope we all get the sociopolitical sand trap that is—how infecting everyone with colorblindness is not the virtuous goal it presumes to be. I hope we are collectively just past the finish line of that nefarious reduction that I need not explain it further.  

I say all of this in relationship to a subject I actually dislike talking about very much—so much, in fact, that I banned the subject from my writing for years: Kanye West.

I have stated for some time that I am done writing about him, but it’s become clear that the standard is unenforceable. I write about white supremacy with some frequency. I do that because it is, with almost no competition, my greatest enemy. And so long as West continues to swathe his fame and vast resources in the advancement of white supremacist ideas and images, I’ll have an opinion that cannot contain itself. I’d say I’ve been doing OK, for the most part, but it has been difficult to hold the line in the Trump era.

I am mostly exhausted by Kanye. His antics have no effect on me directly, save that they sap my energy. I never have to seek him out. Much like living with Donald Trump as president, his shenanigans are delivered fresh to my digital doorstep whenever they occur. So here we are: me, my computer keyboard and Kanye West wearing a White Lives Matter shirt, standing arm-in-arm with the intellectually loathsome Candace Owens.

This moment is by design, of course. It is literally trolling on West’s part, and like most of his other moments, it works. And while it is a sad dynamic, it is also extremely frustrating. Kanye could pick up the phone and convince almost anyone in the world to hang out with him in order to make a political point, and he consistently chooses the bottom of the barrel.

So we’re clear, his attempts at attention are not frustrating in the way that watching someone’s wasted potential is. It’s frustrating in the way that watching an evil thing happen that you cannot stop is, like a police bodycam video. It is damage for damage’s sake, and it only serves those who worship at the altar of attention. Not building, not guidance, not wisdom. Just raw and naked attention. It is disruption for the sake of disruption that doesn’t really care what the result is, which is to say it is racial anarchy. It is the kind of energy I’m used to receiving from dyed-in-the-white-wool racists, but it’s exhausting that I have to deal with it on top of the regular-strength racism I face every day. I wonder if West has ever heard the Morrison quote. I would hope that if he had, he would see how he is contributing to the problem she describes, how his antics pull away energy and focus from building a better and more productive world. He has the resources to at least pretend to be the kind of person Morrison’s quote seeks to herald. So much is lost engaging him over and over again, which is why I swore off doing so in the first place. But escalation is a real thing. I suppose so long as West keeps reaching over the wall of my sensibilities, I’ll have something to say about him. It’s how I would treat any other agent of white supremacy.