Kanye and Dubya: A Sordid Affair (BY SAM HAN)
So, this happened:
- George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, publishes a memoir, wherein he suggests that Kanye West’s implying that he, Dubya, was a racist, was the low-point of his presidency. (Baffling.)
- Kanye, in attempting to respond to such a proclamation by a former President and promote his album, hires a media consultant, to help formulate his response that would appear on a Today show segment with Matt Lauer.
- Kanye apologizes retroactively and says, in light of Taylor-gate, he knows what it feels like to be labeled wrongly as a racist.
- Bush forgives him. (He calls him “Conway West.” Yet again, baffling.)
- NBC plays video of the Taylor-gate during Kanye’s interview and he is visibly upset. He goes on Twitter to do what post-Twitter Kanye does.
- He cancels scheduled performance on the Today show, as some kind of retaliation.
- Russell Simmons, among others, comes to Kanye’s side in an open letter and says he should have never apologized.
That is now, this was then:
While Kanye was delivering a string of strong albums, the country was bracing itself for what looked like blunder after blunder: the utter disasters that were the two wars, the president’s inability to say the right thing, his touching foreign leaders in ways utterly inappropriate and his not knowing his way around doors. As if to add insult to injury, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, with his “Good job Brownie!” and what not, was just painful to watch. No wonder people were disaffected with politics. Look at this fool! Amid the torrent of images of poor, mostly black, Americans, stripped of their dignity, wading in water up to their chests, there was a clarion voice that cut “through the (static on the) wire”: it was Kanye West, interrupting Austin Powers in regular-face, saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
….
We were so happy about it, those of us who were anti-Bush. There he was, a rapper of all things, making a grand statement. We relished it. Loved it. YouTubed it. And if there were Tumblr, we would’ve <3’d the ISH out of it. But why?
Was it simply because of the lack of superego that West displayed? Or, was it speaking truth to power?
Simmons’ letter to Kanye, in spite of it being mostly an exercise in futility and unnecessariness, may give us some clues. Rush:
[I]t was not the particulars of your words that mattered, it was the essence of a feeling of the insensitivity towards our communities that many of us have felt for far too long. It was the image of the president, our president, the President of the United States Of America, peering out the window of an airplane, as the people on the ground were drowning, that hurt us the most. For centuries, our people have relentlessly tread water as hard as they could to stay afloat, and here we were, literally drowning, and it felt like the president was insensitive. There is no need to apologize, Kanye. You spoke from your heart and that is all we will ever ask from you.
In effect, it may not have been the meaning of the words uttered by Kanye that made a difference. It was just the speaking out itself; the speech-act.
Therefore, the Kanye affair was an affective event in American cultural politics, a coming together of what the early French sociologist Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” Or, Jon Caramanica in the Times put it:
Speaking ill of Mr. Bush remains the bravest thing Mr. West has done, the one moment where his inability to shut up resulted in widespread embrace.
It was an expression and sharing of an emotion that exceeded the level of individual and did not rely on rationality. It had no resemblance to what may be called a “moral argument.” Or a better way to put it may be that it was a moral claim with no argument.
What do I mean?
Well, one need not be well-versed in political science to know that whether Bush cared about black people didn’t have much bearing on the government response to Katrina. The machinations of FEMA, the National Guard, Homeland Security and other agencies have much greater, more direct, impact on the lives and livelihoods of those people. Poor black people in this country are victims of systems and structures not individual Presidents’ decisions to not land or just fly over a disaster zone.
(If one is interested in how this kind of thing works I’d highly recommend W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction, perhaps the locus classicus of American historical sociology. And it so happens, Melissa Harris Perry deals with Reconstruction a bit in her piecefor The Nation on Kanye and Dubya.)
Tricia Rose, professor at Brown, makes this point as well in a series of Facebook wall posts.
Tricia Rose Would someone explain why it is that Kanye West ended up apologizing to GW Bush, but Bush has not felt compelled to admit the devastating impact of his response to Katrina on so many black Americans?
Tricia Rose Kanye is apologizing about his comment to Bush about Bush hating black people. Of course far more than an apology is due everyone in the region, but it’s not the issue I’m raising here.
Tricia Rose Here we are dealing with Bush’s (and the media’s) need to devalue the underlying truth of what Kanye West was getting at: that there was an anti-black anchor to the response to Katrina and New Orleans— that everyone in that beautiful city/region suffered from this along with the natural disaster.
But while Rose makes the right point, is not the object of critique still Bush himself, who is seemingly cathected in both Rose and Simmons’ statements?
A thought experiment: Currently, black unemployment is somewhere around 16%, 6 points higher than the national unemployment rate of 10%. (The way that unemployment stats are calculated in the States is a complete farce. But since I have no citable source as to what “real” unemployment would be, I’m using these.) Black people, black men in particular, are especially hard hit. Would one make the statement that “Barack Obama doesn’t care about black people” and have it be resoundingly agreed upon by the same folks who clapped on their feet for Kanye West in front of the television? No, of course not. (Or maybe, they should.) The point is that the President’s “inner feelings” have nothing to do with governance and policy.
Take a look at Clinton, the most beloved figure in recent political history and whose public image, as a Democrat, is at an all time high. For those who doubt this please see his campaign schedule in the run-up to the recent midterm elections. That man was put to work. Clinton’s “workfare” or Welfare Reform, however, was undoubtedly the final patch of dirt on the coffin in the long funeral of the Great Society social programs of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, sitting in 2010, can quite easily be considered the most radical, left President that we have had in American history! Now, if we compare LBJ and Slick Willy on a personal racism scale, I’m not so sure that LBJ would fair very well. (He was a Texan.) So the question becomes how do we measure the racist effects of a particular American presidency? Is it ad hominem or through policy?
As my friend Jay Smooth notes:
When it comes to the aftermath of Katrina, parsing out the consequences of Bush’s actions and how race may have played into that seems to be less important than how discussing race effects President Bush’s self esteem. I think that points to the biggest stumbling block we have in being able to work on race issues in this country: the way almost every debate becomes so hyper-personalized, and focuses on whether a particular criticism really means, “You’re a bad person” when we should be focusing on issues that are bigger than ourselves and have nothing to do with what’s inside our heart.
I say all this to emphasize that racism in America exists within a history of socially and psychologically structured oppression, throughout American society itself, not just the government, but among its citizens, who are complicit in its horrors. The critique of American racism exemplified by Simmons and Rose beckons a face, a person, a body, in sum, an origin. But what if we were to risk the thought that racism, whose victims we saw in the SuperDome, could exist without racists, as the sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has suggested? Hence, the Kanye affair may have been not so much the speaking out by the subaltern but the moment of clarity for liberal-left politics in America. With the help of the spectacular nature of the media event, it was when the line between the bad guys and the good guys were most clearly drawn. (Those of us who cheered West on were, of course, good within this framework.) The chaos of everyday life had somehow been calmed by the homeostasis of West’s words. It was catharsis overplayed as resistance—the release, the sublimation of American liberal moral conscience.
To demand an admission of racism does not do much in the United States today. No one, not even overt racists, will “appreciate being called a racist”(as Bush accused Kanye of doing during the Matt Lauer interview). Even people who are clearly racist, preface their statements with “I’m not a racist but…”
What would have happened if Bush in his memoir, Decision Points, had revealed some racism? What would it have done other than confirm what people suspected? Would black unemployment decline magically? What is the perceived end-goal to demand that someone cop to their racism? Will knowing how many people in America are racist somehow lead to a moral revolution here, not to mention economic justice?
My point is not to defend Bush but to reorient the object of anti-racist thinking and practice as it relates to Kanye and Dubya. Perhaps it is easier to think that it was some Connecticut-transplanted-to-Texas, failed-baseball-executive-Methodist President named George Walker Bush who was responsible for the debacle that was Katrina. It is cleaner, and less morally and psychologically disorienting to remember that we, Americans, elected this man into the highest office in the land…twice.
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Sam Han is Instructional Technology Fellow of the Macaulay Honors College/CUNY and a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, as well as a regular contributor to here & there. He is author of Navigating Technomedia: Caught in the Web (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007) and editor (with Daniel Chaffee) of The Race of Time: A Charles Lemert Reader(Paradigm Publishers, 2009). He is at work on WEB 2.0 (Routledge, forthcoming) and a dissertation entitled “Technologies of Spirit: The Digital Milieu of Contemporary Religion,” which explores the resonance of contemporary Christianity and digital media technologies.
Sam Han is also my friend and former Wesleyan classmate. He is the reason I’m on twitter. You can follow his twitter @caughtintheweb and read more from him here: http://scatteredspeculations.tumblr.com/.
