The Color of Freedom

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of  Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.
"I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye" Ta-Nehisi Coates

If "White Freedom" is the ability to be an individual, to be one's own person and to be able to live one's life without having to move in lockstep with 40+ million other people, no wonder Kanye West wants it. I want it. And this despite the fact that Mr. Coates portrays White Freedom as a bad thing, the genesis of oppression and theories of racial supremacy.

I think that it's worth understanding this in a way that removes the moralizing from having already taken a side. Rather than White freedom and Black freedom, this strikes me as examining a difference between Individual freedom and Collective freedom. And this is one of the major ideological axes of American politics, as the American Right tends to value Individual, and the Left the Collective. The difference being that the political division is portrayed more as one of broader concerns for human welfare, as opposed to a Black and White issue.

I'm somewhat disappointed with the way Mr. Coates frames this issue, placing reprehensible images of "White freedom" alongside esteemed images of "Black freedom," as a way of saying "One of these is better than the other." While partisans will, of course, disagree, in my understanding of the world, there is no determining which of Individual freedom and Collective freedom is better than they other. They are simply different from one another, and each has its own set of assumptions, costs and benefits. And depending on which of those aligns more closely with the way one views the world, one may seem more appealing than the other. Better For You or Better For Me is not the same as simply Better.

One could make the argument that Mr. Coates is simply arguing that Black/Collective freedom is better for Black people in the United States. But in this, I think, he (sadly) falls into one of the traps that our lives have laid for us.

It would be nice if those who sought to use their talents as entrée into another realm would do so with the same care which they took in their craft. But the Gods are fickle and the history of this expectation is mixed. Stevie Wonder fought apartheid. James Brown endorsed a racist Nixon. There is a Ray Lewis for every Colin Kaepernick, an O.J. Simpson for every Jim Brown, or, more poignantly, just another Jim Brown. And we suffer for this, because we are connected. Michael Jackson did not just destroy his own face, but endorsed the destruction of all those made in similar fashion.

There is an assumption here. An assumption that we cannot look out on the world around us and make our own ways. And so Michael Jackson must be criticized, rather than understood, for his struggles with creating a version of himself that he could live with. Because, since it resembled a White man more than a Black one, the rest of us were reduced in our capacity to understand how to be okay with who we are. If White freedom is Individual freedom, and Black freedom is Collective freedom, then Black people are better off with a Collective Black freedom because we are poor at being individuals and still working together towards common ends. But in my own experience, this is due to a dislike of the individual, a dislike that is brought on by attributing Whiteness to the individual; thus seeing them as providing aid and comfort to the enemy.

My freshman year of college, at a Historically Black College/University was a fight from one end to the other, as other students seemed to resent the fact that I spoke in the same way as a suburban White person, and shared many of their interests as well. It was seen as an affectation, and a deliberate rejection of my Blackness, rather than a side effect of living in an overwhelmingly White suburb from the time I was in kindergarten. I was seen as having intentionally severed my connection to the greater community, rather than having simply grown up apart from it.

The irony of the situation was that my father had sent me to Hampton University, allying himself with my general indifference to where I went to college, as a means of reestablishing that very connection, realizing himself that I had been unable to maintain it after so many years of being connected only for a few hours here or a day there.

But the cost that was demanded for connection was the denial of self, and I had spent too many years fighting with my grade school, junior high and high school classmates to define and defend that self to surrender it to a bunch of hostile strangers on the mere basis that we shared a skin tone, and they were brittle. And so I warred with them, and when my father came out in bitter disapproval of my decision to return to school closer to home, I warred with him, too. If was condemned for being too White to satisfy them, then so be it. I'd spent years being isolated for being different. I could handle that remaining the case.

If the Black people that I encountered that one year at Hampton suffered, due to a superficial connection, so be it. Their understanding that I was not only destroying my own psyche, but endorsing the destruction of theirs, did not reach me. Not that it would have made a difference if it had. I had no use for them, or their psyches. I answered rejection with rejection.

Mr. Coates ends with this:

And so for Kanye West, I wonder what he might be, if he could find himself back into connection, back to that place where he sought not a disconnected freedom of “I,” but a black freedom that called him back—back to the bone and drum, back to Chicago, back to Home.

But to find yourself back into connection, that connection must be in a place where it can be legitimately found. In my own life, it never was, just as one never "finds" a valuable item on a store shelf. Instead there was a demand that I purchase it. Looking back on it, I realize that the issue was that the people who wanted me to buy back my Blackness and connection to the broader Black community, didn't realize how high a price that they had set on it, just as I think that Mr. Coates doesn't realize how high a price he expects that Michael Jackson should have paid.

Moving between the worlds of Individual and Collective freedom, or White and Black freedom has costs. Costs that are invisible to those who never leave the paradigm in which they were raised. When I encountered Black freedom, it did not call to me. It demanded my presence, and my obedience, and it cared not what I needed to sacrifice in order to meet its demands. But more importantly, it didn't fathom the uncertainty it created. It required that I throw my lot in with people who saw me as deliberately unlike them, and as such allied with a hostile power. But it didn't guarantee a welcome for me when I had done so.

And I think that Mr. Coates does the same. He sees Kanye West as willfully rejecting connection and calling upon him to return to the Collective, but for the good of the collective, and to who-knows-what for Mr. West. There is no admonition to the Collective to open its arms wide and take him in without judgement.

During childhood and adolescence, I'd learned what struck me as the nature and the danger of peer pressure when it came to outsiders. Peer pressure offered a transaction: obedience to the norms of the group, in return for acceptance. But it didn't offer a contract, and the group always demanded the obedience come first; so there was always the risk that one would be left holding the bag. People dislike being asked to pay for something that they understand that they are due, and the Collective is no different. And so the only way that "Home" can truly call to someone who is not there is to be okay with the call never being answered. "Home" has to understand that it is asking for something that does not belong to it.

When I clashed with my fellow students at Hampton University, some 31 years ago, now, they felt that they were admonishing me for what I had done. I felt that they were coming after me for who I was. But to them, who I was, who I really was, was someone just like them, and only a deliberate action had made me different. They too, I think, felt that they were calling me back, rather than demanding that I go to a place that I had never before been. My anger with them has subsided. I'm older now, and I think I understand more. Just as I think that I'll also understand if Mr. West finds himself angry with Mr. Coates. I hope that Mr. Coates will understand, too, but I don't think he will.