Kanye West borrowed a page from the Donald Trump playbook on Tuesday, May 1 – taking aim at the media for putting him through what he called a modern form of Willie Lynchism. In the process, he re-addressed his inflammatory remarks on slavery and in an attempt to explain how they were taken out of context.
“To make myself clear: of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will,” Ye tweeted, after likening his struggle to be echoed to his enslaved ancestors’ tongues being cut off so that they couldn’t speak.
West’s tweets came after hours of backlash directed his way over remarks he made regarding slavery as a mindstate. In the middle of him stressing the power citizens have to see themselves out of the supposed psychological imprisonment, he took his explanation a step further to say that it had to take some measure of choice for so many people to remain in bondage for four hundred years.
“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,'” he then went on to add in one of his Twitter posts.