The Power To Choose

“When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sounds like a choice. Like, you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison.”
Kanye West

This statement, made to TMZ by the entertainer has started yet another teapot tempest, as one expected it would, but maybe the discussion that it sparked should be redirected. Many people are angry at Mr. West because of a narrative that tends to use the understanding of people having a choice as a way of criticizing them for making the wrong choice. Mr. West's statement that Black slaves were "mentally in prison," speaks to this. While what he's referring to is nothing more than a variation on the phenomenon we now call Stockholm Syndrome, there is a degree to which it is considered a deliberate choice on the part of the prisoners; the enslaved, the hostage, what have you.

And when people argue with Mr. West over his characterization of slavery, and its effects on the Black psyche, the argument leaves out a very important point. Namely that there is a difference between lacking an easy and available choice, and lacking a choice. It's worth keeping in mind that the relative merits of choices do not map to their absolute merits; when the available choices are ranked against one another, the best of them may still be a crushingly crappy choice, compared to what one would want in that situation.

The ability to choose between multiple bad outcomes does not negate being victimized at the hands of someone who has closed off the other options. Or in other words, simply having a choice does not saddle one with moral culpability for the outcome. But it's unsurprising that people may have difficulty with this. The moral logic of the terrorist, which claims that the murder of a hostage is the fault of the person who refuses their demands, had also become the moral logic of the police official, which states that the shooting of a suspect is that person's fault for failure to follow commands. In both cases, there is a forgetting that the fatal act was in the hands of someone who had to make choices of their own. And while the expectations of them may have been constrained, their actions were still of their own doing. And in the same way that the terrorist or the police spokesperson use the actions of others as a shield against culpability, so do the defenders of the South of old. If culpability must be shared, then there is less for the slave holding generations (and their modern descendants) to bear.

Later, in an attempt at damage control, Mr. West took to Twitter, and said: “Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will. 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.”

And in this, he tapped into another part of our thinking about choices, a concept that many people in the Black community want an exemption from, but seldom challenge; the tendency to fetishize resistance to the death, considering it a corollary to "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." But many people fear death, and understand it to be the absolute worst outcome of a situation, one that people should do anything to avoid. The debate over physician-assisted suicide speaks to this; there is a train of thought that holds that no matter how painful, hopeless or deprived a life is, the very living of that life is infinitely better than being dead, and so that life must be preserved.

And against that backdop, being, or remaining, enslaved can be seen as a rational choice. But perhaps it is not so surprising that Mr. West may feel otherwise. After all, he wholeheartedly backs President Trump, who landed himself in hot water when he derided Senator John McCain's status as a war hero on the basis of his capture and imprisonment by the enemy. They are perhaps united in the sense that submission to a perceived superior force should be considered a form of complicity, if not collaboration.

There is another concept I think is in play here: A belief in the power of Virtue to overcome the power of brute force. But, at least as I see the world, being a good person, or an honorable one, does not lend one the power to defeat all odds, except in fairy tales. And so we can understand that enslaved Africans and their descendants had a choice to rise up, or remain docile, but that neither one of these may have had good ends. While Mr. West may view the likely outcome of a mass slave revolt as the self-motivated slaves quickly winning their freedom from their outnumbered White owners, it's just as possible that it would have ended in the mass slaughter of millions of people. Again, we can make the point that there was an available choice. And that it was impossible at the time, to understand precisely how it would have worked out. But perhaps the hand had written enough on the wall to make an educated guess.

If we say, though, that Mr. West refuses to understand that the choice of being a slave may have been the most sensible choice among bad options, criticizing him for saying there was a choice reinforces that lack of understanding. And this may be seen as corrosive, because the idea that having only bad choices is equivalent to not being able to choose contributes to a sense of helplessness in the face of adversity, when agency is needed most. The person who has only good options, or a clear and easy choice between good and bad outcomes does not need to be particularly active in pursuit of their own self-interest and betterment to the degree that someone tasked with choosing the least bad of several uncertain and undesirable outcomes has to be.

Lastly, I would make this point about how choices are viewed that could perhaps do with a rethink. It may be possible to understand the Black community in the United States over time as being an entity, but it shouldn't be thought of as being an individual. It's individual members are not neurons that contribute to a collective consciousness, personality and, perhaps most importantly for this context, decision engine. For the whole of the 400 years that Mr. West references, each and every individual slave (or even free Black person) had choices to make as to how to conduct their lives, and they had to make them for themselves. Not that they couldn't collaborate, but they were no more able to completely outsource their decision making than I am.

It's worth noting that some number of them chose to take some pretty intense risks to obtain their freedom. And it's also worth noting that for some of them, those risks did not pay off. And while I suspect that people know this, this may be another part of history that suffers from being taught primarily in grade school. It's unlikely that the horrors of being a recaptured slave would be taught to even junior-high school children. I can imagine traumatized children and angry parents without much effort. And while a collective uprising may have insulated many from the direct costs of failure, attempting an escape alone, or only with family members meant understanding what could very well happen.

Because the Kanye West controversy touches on so many aspects of what it means to be Black in the United States, American history and the modern politics of race, it's unlikely to result in a reexamination of how many people think about what it means to have choice. And that's unfortunate, because there is a benefit there.