Kanye West: King of the Sunken Place, "Watch the Throne"

Let’s see if the all knowing white one will speak on Jerry Jones.

Waiting for the “it’s what they did back in the day” responses to trying to keep schools segregated
 
Stewart sounds like when third-way Democrats talked about the GOP: give them an inch and maybe they'll give us an inch back in return. We've seen how well that worked out.

LOL.

Here's the thing: to have a productive discussion, both parties have to share a common, basic set of truths; it's a waste of time for an astronaut (or even an astronomer) to discuss the solar system with a flat-earther. They have to agree on the shape and mechanisms of celestial objects first. The issue is made even more difficult to tolerate when the flat-earther decides that they will impose their understanding of the universe by force. Hard to maintain a discussion in such conditions.

The problem is epistemological: there no longer is an agreement on what's real/valid/true and what isn't because our means of communication (namely, the internet and social media) have made it possible for alternative "knowledge" bubbles to amplify and segregate. For Stewart's solution to work, something will have to pop these bubbles and force folks to share the same public square/debate space again in order to challenge one another's basic truths and settle on what's right and what's wrong.
The first few minutes of Stewart’s appearance are a great example of how a comedian can engage stereotypes ethically while still being funny. He's ridiculing the stereotype itself, not just invoking it for shock value.

I agree that, in effort to appear reasonable and promote reconciliation, he came off as a bit naïve.

It seemed as if he was attempting to invoke a well-known excerpt from Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

"Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

Critically, Dr. King is referencing the exposure of injustice, not the mindless promulgation of hate speech. Visibility alone does not cure misinformation.

Contrary to their portrayals in Florida textbooks, Dr. King and his contemporaries did not win progress simply by being nice to White people, appealing to their better angels, and convincing them that racism was bad. Such narratives reduce hard fought progress to White largesse, something beneficently granted after thoughtful consideration, the fulfillment of a polite request - not a righteous demand.

The heroes of that generation, to whom we owe so much, cancelled the Montgomery bus system. They cancelled Woolworth's. They shut down commerce. They blocked traffic. They filled the jails.
They put their own bodies on the line.

Images of police brutality, of attack dogs, of fire hoses, of hollowed out churches ripped apart by terrorist bombers, of children handcuffed, of inhuman cruelty on so massive a scale, humiliated the United States in the eyes of the world.
THAT is what was exposed to "the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion" - not someone getting up on stage and saying "hey, you know what was an interesting book? The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. Funny how we're not allowed to talk about that anymore, right? Are they afraid of the truth?"

If you're going to invoke the language of that era, you'd better include the context.


While Stewart references valid concerns about the Internet's algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers allowing hate speech to proceed unchecked, it's as if he slept through Trump's term and its demonstration of how not to report on lies. gry60 gry60 's point on the matter reminds me of a Margaret Sullivan column on the dilemmas facing the journalists who cover political misinformation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...fb41de-e947-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html

A lot has changed in our lifetimes. I think we can agree that the accessibility conspiracy theories has not been reduced as a result of the Internet.


If Stewart's proposed remedy is so simple as merely countering lies with truth, whose interests are truly served by refusing to call out hate speech for what it is - because it "shuts down the conversation?" Air and light for White Nationalist propaganda, but go easy on calling people "anti-Semitic?" Swallowing that one requires more than the usual comic dose of suspended disbelief.

There are, certainly, cases where there label has been misapplied - criticism of the Israeli government, for examples, or the situations like Whoopi Goldberg's, which struck me as a simple case of applying a contemporary American definition of race to the Holocaust despite the Nazis being pretty clear that it was "about race."
As a general principal, though, it's weird for a "free speech comedian" type to argue that we should take some words off the table because they hurt people's feelings and are thus unproductive.

This is something I remember hearing constantly from White students as an undergraduate - that calling them (or anything, really) "racist" made them uncomfortable and was counterproductive, because it shut down the discussion.
This is nothing if not an assertion of privilege. How is calling someone a racist "shutting down the discussion," but saying racist things is not?

White, cishet, able, neurotypical Christian Americans can choose to disengage from "hard conversations" and unpleasant realities. The rest of us cannot.
Even those who are intersectionally insulated (by wealth, for example), will find that, eventually, no matter how much you want to avoid "the discussion," "the discussion" will find you.

We cling tightest to relative privilege by denying its existence.

By that same token, we can acknowledge as valid the need for Jewish people to counter scapegoating, stereotypes, and hate speech that have subjected them to violence, harassment, and discrimination while also recognizing that when White Jewish people leverage their Whiteness to this end it will invariably have racist effects. That's not fighting fire with water.


The conciliatory centrist view on this is contradictory.

If we can agree that words matter, that facts matter, and that hate speech shouldn't be left unchecked, it makes no sense to adopt some absolutist "free speech" mentality that, itself, curtails the speech of those subjected to hatred and prejudice.
It's like drafting rules of engagement for anarchists.

If you're going to appropriate the language of civil rights icons, you should at least acknowledge that the victories that have been won, the progress that has been made, have not been the result of the soft power of persuasion alone.
Meaningful gains have always required the application of collective power as well.

It is not "unfair" to counter speech with speech, nor to back one's convictions through consumer choice.

Free speech is not unaccountable speech.


The interaction of various forms of group privilege can create disparities in the impact (and adverse impact) of such efforts - and we have to be able to discuss that without the oversimplification of a linear "hierarchy of hierarchies" in a multidimensional world. Doing so renders as invisible all those who are pulled apart by false binaries.

Not all Jewish people are Lyor Cohen. Not all trans women are Caitlyn Jenner.

People lose touch with that when they try to turn this into a "contest of champions" and make it about one wealthy celebrity vs. another, throwing out the bad behavior of one to excuse the bad behavior of the other.

Where did you get millions from? Did Kyrie tell you this number directly or is this something you just pulled out of thin air? How do you know he's not referring to a small minority who's moving amongst the larger group?
He used his platform to signal boost a movie that lists among “five major falsehoods”:

“That 6 million Jews were killed in a Holocaust during WWII.”
and
“That all races are equal”

Is that really something you want to defend?

Kyrie himself does not stand by this content. Do you?

Some of y'all like typing too much. You're one of them. And for the record I've provided articles to whatever I've mentioned only to have my post deleted shortly thereafter. As I stated before, black man states his religious views and people get upset.
The only post you’ve had deleted in this thread was some article about how the operators of an Hasidic private school in New York pled guilty to fraud.

I don’t see how this is “proof” of Jewish impostors run amok.

In 2020, we banned racists who were throwing out anecdotal cases of property damage to justify or deflect from the systemic police brutality and anti-Black racism that necessitated that year's protests. I see no reason to let similar behavior slide in this instance.
It's disrespectful, especially in this context, to go scrounging around on Google to find examples of bad things individual Jewish people have done - like that somehow counterbalances the scales of justice.

If that post hadn't been deleted, we were probably two replies away from somebody posting videos of Deni Avdija turnovers as evidence that "Kanye was right about the Jews."


If that's the kind of content anyone wants, you're welcome to head over to Apartheid Clyde's smoldering dumpster fire and soak up the freedom.
 
The first few minutes of Stewart’s appearance are a great example of how a comedian can engage stereotypes ethically while still being funny. He's ridiculing the stereotype itself, not just invoking it for shock value.

I agree that, in effort to appear reasonable and promote reconciliation, he came off as a bit naïve.

On one hand, he seemed to be attempting to invoke a well-known excerpt from Dr. King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

"Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured."

Critically, Dr. King is referencing the exposure of injustice, not the mindless promulgation of hate speech. Visibility alone does not cure misinformation.

Contrary to their portrayals in Florida textbooks, Dr. King and his contemporaries did not win progress simply by being nice to White people, appealing to their better angels, and convincing them that racism was bad. Such narratives reduce hard fought progress to White largesse, something beneficently granted after thoughtful consideration, the fulfillment of a polite request - not a righteous demand.

The heroes of that generation, to whom we owe so much, cancelled the Montgomery bus system. They cancelled Woolworth's. They shut down commerce. They blocked traffic. They filled the jails.
They put their own bodies on the line.

Images of police brutality, of attack dogs, of fire hoses, of hollowed out churches ripped apart by terrorist bombers, of children handcuffed, of inhuman cruelty on so massive a scale, humiliated the United States in the eyes of the world.
THAT is what was exposed to "the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion" - not someone getting up on stage and saying "hey, you know what was an interesting book? The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. Funny how we're not allowed to talk about that anymore, right? Are they afraid of the truth?"

If you're going to invoke the language of that era, you'd better include the context.


While Stewart's concerns about the Internet's algorithmic filter bubbles and echo chambers allowing hate speech to proceed unchecked, it's as if he slept through Trump's term and its demonstration of how not to report on lies. gry60 gry60 's point on the matter reminds me of a Margaret Sullivan column on the dilemmas facing the journalists who cover political misinformation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/life...fb41de-e947-11ea-bc79-834454439a44_story.html

A lot has changed in our lifetimes. I think we can agree that the accessibility conspiracy theories has not been reduced as a result of the Internet.


If Stewart's proposed remedy is so simple as merely countering lies with truth, whose interests are truly served by refusing to call out hate speech for what it is - because it "shuts down the conversation?" Air and light for White Nationalist propaganda, but go easy on calling people "anti-Semitic?" Swallowing that one requires more than the usual comic dose of suspended disbelief.

There are, certainly, cases where there label has been misapplied - like Whoopi Goldberg's, which struck me as a simple case of applying a contemporary American definition of race to the Holocaust despite the Nazis being pretty clear that it was "about race."
As a general principal, though, it's weird for a "free speech comedian" type to argue that we should take some words off the table because they hurt people's feelings and are thus unproductive.

This is something I remember hearing constantly from White students as an undergraduate - that calling them (or anything, really) "racist" made them uncomfortable and was counterproductive, because it shut down the discussion.
This is nothing if not an assertion of privilege. How is calling someone a racist "shutting down the discussion," but saying racist things is not?

White, cishet, able, neurotypical Christian Americans can choose to disengage from "hard conversations" and unpleasant realities. The rest of us cannot.
Even those who are intersectionally insulated (by wealth, for example), will find that, eventually, no matter how much you want to avoid "the discussion," "the discussion" will find you.

We cling tightest to relative privilege by denying its existence.

By that same token, we can acknowledge as valid the need for Jewish people to counter scapegoating, stereotypes, and hate speech that have subjected them to violence, harassment, and discrimination while also recognizing that when White Jewish people leverage their Whiteness to this end it will invariably have racist effects. That's not fighting fire with water.


The conciliatory centrist view on this is contradictory.

If we can agree that words matter, that facts matter, and that hate speech shouldn't be left unchecked, it makes no sense to adopt some absolutist "free speech" mentality that, itself, curtails the speech of those subjected to hatred and prejudice.
It's like drafting rules of engagement for anarchists.

If you're going to appropriate the language of civil rights icons, you should at least acknowledge that the victories that have been won, the progress that has been made, have not been the result of the soft power of persuasion alone.
Meaningful gains have always required the application of collective power as well.

It is not "unfair" to countering speech with speech, nor to back one's convictions through consumer choice.

Free speech is not unaccountable speech.


The interaction of various forms of group privilege can create disparities in the impact (and adverse impact) of such efforts - and we have to be able to discuss that without the oversimplification of a linear "hierarchy of hierarchies" in a multidimensional world. Doing so renders as invisible all those who are pulled apart by false binaries.

Not all Jewish people are Lyor Cohen. Not all trans women are Caitlyn Jenner.

People lose touch with that when they try to turn this into a "contest of champions" and make it about one wealthy celebrity vs. another, throwing out the bad behavior of one to excuse the bad behavior of the other.


He used his platform to signal boost a movie that lists among “five major falsehoods”:

“That 6 million Jews were killed in a Holocaust during WWII.”
and
“That all races are equal”

Is that really something you want to defend?

Kyrie himself does not stand by this content. Do you?


The only post you’ve had deleted in this thread was some article about how the operators of an Hasidic private school in New York pled guilty to fraud.

I don’t see how this is “proof” of Jewish impostors run amok.

In 2020, we banned racists who were throwing out anecdotal cases of property damage to justify or deflect from the systemic police brutality and anti-Black racism that necessitated that year's protests. I see no reason to let similar behavior slide in this instance.
It's disrespectful, especially in this context, to go scrounging around on Google to find examples of bad things individual Jewish people have done - like that somehow counterbalances the scales of justice.

If that post hadn't been deleted, we were probably two replies away from somebody posting videos of Deni Avdija turnovers as evidence that "Kanye was right about the Jews."


If that's the kind of content anyone wants, you're welcome to head over to Apartheid Clyde's smoldering dumpster fire and soak up the freedom.
If you're aware of any of the dealings of some of these individuals and institutions, you would know that some of them aren't Jewish and conduct a lot of fraud, which is why I posted the article. On said date, I went to add a follow-up, but once I saw my then earlier post was deleted, I already knew what time it was and didn't bother.

But thank you for at least admitting that my post was deleted. The resident suck-offs claimed DuckTales. I also provided additional proof in my more recent posts of the imposters, but I'm sure y'all will move the goalpost. I also did not defend the documentary. I defended Kyrie and him stating "how can he be antisemitic when he is semite." Are you suggesting that Kyrie could not possibly be Jewish whether by ancestry or conversion that you're just simply not aware of?
 
How has nobody posted that he said he went to Mar a lago to ask Trump to be his running mate 😭

BE57F43A-2FC8-45A9-87A5-0652E432F17F.jpeg
 
Are you suggesting that Kyrie could not possibly be Jewish whether by ancestry or conversion that you're just simply not aware of?
Who is saying that Black people can’t be Jewish?

That’s not even an argument. It’s just self-evidently false.
 
Imagine if Elon Musk tweeted out a link to a movie with a ton of racist tropes about black African Americans, including that they are genetically prone to violence

Then people got pissed, and called him out on it, but also asked him directly "Are you racist against African Americans"

And Musk's response is "How can I be racist against African Americans, I am an African American"

Playing a game of semantics instead of directly answering the question. How do you think people would take that?

And then someone decided to defend him saying that by positing news stories about some black people committing violent crimes

When called out for this, for this being a goalpost move and not addressing the original issue regarding an unproven and inflammatory accusation about a large group of people; that person starts protesting and complaining that people are denying that there have been black people that have committed violent crimes, he is the only ones talking honestly about it, and the moderation team is treating him unfairly

Imagine how much such foolishness would be mocked

Well, switch out the groups, and this is kinda what is happening right now
 
Last edited:
DCAllAfrican DCAllAfrican
You’ve yet to clarify this remark.
To reiterate my response, is “people of color” not a correct expression to refer to the general population of non-white people?
This may sound arrogant but I’m confident that my English is very very good, so I’d be surprised if there’s a language misunderstanding here.

Belgium Belgium You keep calling black people "colored." I assume it is a language thing.
Context:
What jumped out immediately is the claim that black people can't be racist. The author goes on to correctly state that they can't engage in systemic racism due to lacking that power component, but for some reason doesn't make this distinction between racism and systemic racism.
The author states that racism is only "prejudice + power", but that's systemic racism. Presumably that extends to other people of color as well but it certainly doesn't sound right to not call it racism when for example someone of color throws bananas at black players at a football game and/or makes monkey noises. Sure there's no real power component but it's still racist at the end of the day.
Then there's also the claim that anti-semitism in the black community is equally pervasive as anti-black racism in the Jewish community. I haven't looked up any statistics on that but given that the majority of Jews identify as white, on its face that claim seems ridiculous.
 
Imagine if Elon Musk tweeted out a link to a movie with a ton of racist tropes about black African Americans, including that they are genetically prone to violence

Then people got pissed, and called him out on it, but also asked him directly "Are you racist against African Americans"

And Musk's response is "How can I be racist against African Americans, I am an African American"

Playing a game of semantics instead of directly answering the question. How do you think people would take that?

And then someone decided to defend him saying that by positing news stories about some black people committing violent crimes

When called out for this, for this being a goalpost move and not addressing the original issue regarding an unproven and inflammatory accusation about a large group of people; that person starts protesting and complaining that people are denying that there have been black people that have committed violent crimes, he is the only ones talking honestly about it, and the moderation team is treating him unfairly

Imagine how much such foolishness would be mocked

Well, switch out the groups, and this is kinda what is happening right now

I am dead at at Elon saying “I am an African American” 😭
 
Imagine if Elon Musk tweeted out a link to a movie with a ton of racist tropes about black African Americans, including that they are genetically prone to violence

Then people got pissed, and called him out on it, but also asked him directly "Are you racist against African Americans"

And Musk's response is "How can I be racist against African Americans, I am an African American"

Playing a game of semantics instead of directly answering the question. How do you think people would take that?

And then someone decided to defend him saying that by positing news stories about some black people committing violent crimes

When called out for this, for this being a goalpost move and not addressing the original issue regarding an unproven and inflammatory accusation about a large group of people; that person starts protesting and complaining that people are denying that there have been black people that have committed violent crimes, he is the only ones talking honestly about it, and the moderation team is treating him unfairly

Imagine how much such foolishness would be mocked

Well, switch out the groups, and this is kinda what is happening right now

He tweeted and deleted about Ferguson. Where’s the uproar?
 
i don't understand why don't more people come out and talk about working with ye if that rolling stone article is true
 

Any thoughts on white folks? We keeping them under the same microscope as Ye?

There’s a difference in being Kanye and Kyrie. Kyrie said nothing anti-semetic.

Kanye been said wild **** and not a single thread was made about it. No dissertations. Nothing.

But continue with your rhetoric.
 
 
Back
Top Bottom