Racism, anti-Semitism: Kanye West, an emissary of white supremacy?

It all started on October 3, with a flocked t-shirt with the words “White lives matter” during his Paris Fashion Week show. Kanye West, now calling himself Ye, takes up a white supremacist rallying cry popularized by the Ku Klux Klan to discredit the Black Lives Matter social justice movement fighting against police violence.

But West isn’t his first racist joke. In May 2018 on TMZ he spoke in these terms of the victims of the transatlantic slave trade: “We hear about slavery that lasted 400 years. For 400 years? It seems like a choice”. More recently, he has also questioned the responsibility of police officer Derek Chauvin in the murder of Georges Floyd, which he attributes to an overdose by the latter. He will go so far as to declare in his stories on Instagram that the Black Lives Matter movement is a scam.

Following the uproar aroused by the media exposure of his shirts, rapper P. Diddy attacks him in intermediary networks. West’s reaction will be to say that it is the Jews who use him as a puppet.

It is from this critical point that he will launch into a long series of anti-Semitic remarks. Jonas Pardo, trainer in the fight against anti-Semitism, analyzes this point of contact as the expression of a form of white suprematism: “It is following indignant and legitimate reactions around his use of the slogan White Lives Matter that the West becomes publicly violently anti-Semitic with the traditional slanderous accusations of an organized Jewish lobby that would greatly manipulate the African-American population.If we mirror the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, it is Jews who would be at the helm of the alleged business of replacing whites and Western culture with immigrant populations.The two discourses respond to each other”.

And white supremacist groups weren’t wrong: White Lives Matter and the Goyim Defense League have used his words to advance their agendas and inspire new propaganda campaigns.

But let’s go back to the unfolding of the singer’s anti-Semitic soap opera last October, with in the first act what appears to be a threat on Twitter: “Tonight I’m a little tired, but once again awake, the Jews will suffer the ‘Death with 3’ (US Army high alert level) Will extend its attacks on various media serving the traditional ranks of anti-Semitic troops.

Facing conservative Fox News headliner Tucker Carlson, he’ll pick up on the money-obsessed Jew theme by swinging mockingly: “I’d rather my kids knew Hannuka (Jewish holiday) rather than Kwanzaa (African American Party), at least it would come with some financial genius.

In the Drink Champs podcast, he airs the conspiracy theory of the Jewish lobby that would control the media and entertainment industries, pitting Jews and blacks against each other at the same time: “Jews have taken over the voice of blacks. make us wear Ralph Lauren shirts, get signed to this record label or that, have a Jewish manager, sign to a Jewish basketball team, make a movie on a Jewish platform like Disney. »

In this same podcast he will say: “You get used to the paparazzi taking a picture of you and you don’t get anything from it. You get used to being made fun of by the Jewish media.”

Central to his anti-Semitic diatribes is West’s affiliation with a conspiracy theory that Jews were the prime instigators of the transatlantic slave trade. “The Jewish community, especially in the music industry…they will (coloured people) take and milk us ’til we die,” Ye said on the Drink Champs podcast. The thesis upon which this statement rests has been debunked by historians’ associations, but it leaves its mark to this day.

It originated in “Who Brought the Slaves to America?” by Walter White Jr (1968), itself inspired by Henry Ford’s “International Jew” (1920), then broadcast by the American far right, then exploited by Louis Farrakhan’s Afro-American Nation of Islam movement – and taken up elsewhere in France by Dieudonné and Sorale.

Some commentators invoke Kanye West’s mental disorders to clear him. The fact that he suffers from bipolarity, however, does not depoliticise his discourse. Even in the presumed case that West was in acute fits of paranoia at the time of making these various remarks, the aforementioned fits crystallize around a burgeoning anti-Semitic imagination.

What he says is political, what he says is anti-Semitic. “Anti-Semitism is not incompatible with psychic or mental disorders. Furthermore, racism is too often seen as misdirected anger, a diversion, a “folly”. It’s wrong. It is a social construct that has been forged in history. This is not the story of one individual” concludes Jonas Pardo.

Cover image: Unsplash / Axel Antas-Bergkvist