You Can’t Stand the Nigger I See!: Kanye West’s Analysis of Anti-Black Death

Despite debuting at the number 1 spot on the Billboard charts, the reaction to Kanye West’s Yeezus (2013) has been diverse (Makarechi, 2013). While some critics have embraced Kanye’s brash political commentary on race (Nigatu, 2013), many academics have mobilized an intersectional moralization, pitting his very real material account of the racism that Blacks, especially Black men, suffer against his sexual engagement with women. From being called a violent misogynist (Shird, 2013) to sex crazed (Johnston, 2013), Black progressives and feminists echoing the haloed/hollowed values of their respective disciplinary/political ideologies—ideologies that offer little to nothing to Black Americans, especially the worsening plight of Black men—have condemned Kanye West’s message as little more than the patriarchal ramblings of a power-hungry deviant. Such a condemnation, which exceeds the utility of a corrective criticism, does not aim to transform or interpret Kanye’s sentiments to more ameliorative ends, but rather seeks to eliminate such sentiments because they allegedly come from a pathological/immoral/Black/masculine mind.1 Unlike much of the academic criticism that claims to be in the business of antiracism and critical of white supremacy, but is nonetheless approved of by white journals, white readers, and white colleagues, West completely disregards the morality that sustains the academic’s loyalty to the preapproved disciplinary rhetoric used to convey disdain, and the bourgeois lexicon of academic pretense created to criticize oppression and social inequity.