If you—like any healthy person—took the weekend to log off from the Internet, allow me to welcome you back on this Monday morning, where I have the great misfortune to inform you that Kanye West Did A Thing again while you were away. What's most strikingly obvious is that Kanye West did not release the new album Yandhi that he'd promised would drop on Saturday.
Instead, he did a lot of deeply unpleasant things.
There was his baffling SNL performance, followed by a televised rant that NBC wisely cut from its broadcast.
And if that wasn't exhausting enough, he followed all of that up with a Tweet of himself wearing a MAGA hat with the caption: "this represents good and America becoming whole again. We will no longer outsource to other countries. We build factories here in America and create jobs. We will provide jobs for all who are free from prisons as we abolish the 13th amendment. Message sent with love"
To sum that up, Kanye West appears to be calling for the abolition of the Amendment that abolished slavery. This poorly worded and vague tweet did not go over well, as you'd imagine!
After a few hours of deeply negative feedback, West clarified his tweet, saying: "the 13th Amendment is slavery in disguise meaning it never ended We are the solution that heals"
What he's possibly referring to here is the exception clause of the 13th Amendment, which states that "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
This bolded part of the amendment allowed for slavery and involuntary servitude to continue on plantations and within prisons after it was abolished following the Civil War.
“There’s a reason why this was written into law,” Dennis R. Childs, author of Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, told the Washington Post. “They needed to have a legal cover for [re-enslavement], and the best way to do that was to use [African Americans’] poverty, landlessness, joblessness — their collective dispossession — and the Jim Crow legal system as an excuse to re-enslave that population.”
West has long discussed the systematic incarceration of African Americans in his music, going back to New Slaves, where he rapped “Meanwhile the DEA/teamed up with the CCA/ They tryna lock n***as up/They tryna make new slaves/See that’s that privately owned prisons/Get your piece today.”
And it would make sense that West would call back to this Yeezus track on the weekend he had claimed his Yandhi would be a successor to his 2013 album.
But, does that make his comment helpful?
Of course not. Throughout this year, Kanye West has shared his half-baked—and often flat-out wrong—ideology on any platform he's given. He does it under the guise of creating a dialogue and healing America. Even his initial tweet spoke of unity. But, poorly researched and inappropriately worded statements won't work. In fact, they're doing more harm than good, spreading misinformation and outrage. As much as he claims his intentions are in the right place, Kanye West isn't helping anyone.
Even Ava DuVernay—whose Oscar-nominated documentary 13th explored the exception clause and its connection to modern mass incarceration and prison labor—refused to engage with West's comments.
Long have West's fans written off his troubling behaviour, giving him the benefit of the doubt because he makes such good music, but if he's not even going to make good on an album he'd promised, what are we left with? Just the same regressive dialogue that's destroying America. Words and actions have power—especially from someone as influential as the artist. It's disappointing that things can't be the exact opposite, but disappointment has become what to expect from Kanye West these days.
Matt Miller is a Brooklyn-based culture/lifestyle writer and music critic whose work has appeared in Esquire, Forbes, The Denver Post, and documentaries.
