White supremacist-adjacent,
MAGA-loving Black figures such as Kanye West
would be dismissed as buffoons if they
weren’t so dangerous.
As they
say in Philly, Kanye
West f’d around and found out when he
lost his spot on the Forbes list of
billionaires. This, after Adidas, Gap,
Balenciaga and others dropped their
partnerships with Ye following antisemitic
comments the artist recently made on
social media. Days earlier, Kanye and
fellow traveler, Black white-nationalist
representative Candace Owens were in Paris
sporting “White Lives Matter” hate-speech
designer shirts, which made Ye a national
hero on Fox News.
Kanye and
Candace are following in the footsteps of
Isaiah Montgomery. Montgomery was the only
Black delegate to the 1890 Mississippi
convention. The sole purpose of that
convention was to enact a new state
constitution to legalize voter suppression
and strip Black people of their rights. A
wealthy landowner and business owner who
had been born in enslavement, Montgomery
supported the new constitution, which
included a poll tax and literacy test to
wipe out Black power in the majority Black
state. He believed that “striking down the
rights and liberties of 123,000
freemen” was necessary to bridge the
“chasm (between the races) that has been
widening and deepening for a generation…
that threatens destruction to you and
yours, while it promises no enduring
prosperity to me and mine.”
Frederick
Douglass said Montgomery’s position was an
act of “treason, to the cause of the
colored people, not only of his own state
but of the United States.” Douglass also
saw Montgomery as “a groan of bitter
anguish born of oppression and despair”
and a voice of a “soul from which all hope
had vanished.” The 1890 Mississippi
constitution was the death knell for Black
power in that state, and Black people have
not recovered to this day.
All of this reminds us of the famed
Dave Chappelle character Clayton Bigsby. The
image of Bigsby — a blind Black Klansman
wearing a white hood and shouting “white
power!” at a KKK meeting — made for
outrageous comedy. And yet, real-life Black
people such as West and Owens have outdone
this fictional character.
West is just one of a number of
toxic, white supremacist-adjacent,
MAGA-loving Black figures to go for broke
and fully embrace white power. Whether out
of grift, lunacy, attention seeking or
self-hatred, these Afro-Saxons have decided
to cast their lot with white supremacy, a
game that always results in bad outcomes.
Because white supremacy always results in
death and destruction, and even the
collaborators of color are not protected.
Whatever
the reason, West has spouted anti-Black
rhetoric for years. Many in the Black
community cheered Kanye on in 2005 when
he, responding to the government’s failure
to help the victims of Hurricane
Katrina, said
“George Bush doesn’t care about Black
people.” Something changed over the years,
and West would later say slavery
was
a choice, that Harriet
Tubman “never actually freed the slaves,”
and more recently claimed George
Floyd died from fentanyl use rather
than a police officer’s knee on his neck.
The Floyd family plans to sue Kanye for
“harassment, misappropriation, defamation
and infliction of emotional distress
seeking $250 million dollars in damages,”
and rightly so.
Candace
Owens is one of the more prominent Black
MAGA commentators out there and a face of
Black conservatism who attacks Black Lives
Matter and calls police brutality a myth
Democrats use to
manipulate Black minds.” Among
the Trump cheerleader’s many controversial
statements, Owens praised
Hitler
for his nationalism. “If
Hitler just wanted to make Germany great
and have things run well — OK, fine,” she
said. “The problem is he had dreams
outside of Germany,” she added. “He wanted
to globalize. He wanted everybody to be
German.”
The Black
community helped Owens when she was a
victim of racial discrimination and
harassment, but it seems she has forgotten
all of that for the sake of fame and
fortune. As a high school student in
Stamford, Connecticut, Owens was racially
harassed by white boys who left
threatening voicemails. The NAACP helped her in a lawsuit against
the Stamford school board for failing to
protect her, and she received a $37,500
settlement. One of Owens’ high school
classmates came with receipts and
presented them in a TikTok
video.
Meanwhile,
other
cheerleaders for white supremacy such as
Herschel Walker are powerful because they
cape for white power and will toe the line
because they are empty vessels with empty
heads. Walker personifies all the racist
media stereotypes of Black men in one
package — the inarticulate, dim-witted and
violent brute but also an entertaining
minstrel. This reminds us of Malcolm
X’s
famous speech where he discussed the house
Negro vs. the field Negro.
“So whenever that house Negro
identified himself, he always identified
himself in the same sense that his master
identified himself. When his master said,
‘We have good food,’ the house Negro would
say, ‘Yes, we have plenty of good food.’
‘We’ have plenty of good food,” Malcolm
said.
"When the master said that ‘we have
a fine home here,’ the house Negro said,
‘Yes, we have a fine home here.’ When the
master would be sick, the house Negro
identified himself so much with his master
he’d say, ‘What’s the matter boss, we sick?’
His master’s pain was his pain,” he added.
“And it hurt him more for his master to be
sick than for him to be sick himself. When
the house started burning down, that type of
Negro would fight harder to put the master’s
house out than the master himself would.”
In the
21st century, the Black people Malcolm X
called out have aligned themselves with
power. Supreme Court Justice Clarence
Thomas has become one of the most powerful
people in America’s burning house of white
supremacy. Thomas, whose wife Ginni
participated in the Jan. 6 insurrection
and attempted overthrow of the U.S.
government, is a member of a court bought
and captured by right-wing extremist donors with dirty money to erase voting
rights, reproductive freedom, worker’s
rights and environmental protection.
Thomas — once presented as the
poster child for Black conservatism to
promote the benefits of Black people lifting
themselves up by their bootstraps —
demonstrates how Black faces are used to
burn the bridges to multiracial democracy
and promote Jim Crow fascism.
The spirit of Isaiah Montgomery
lives on. His 21st-century ideological
descendants are causing just as much trouble
today, and they’re going to get us hurt.
This commentary is also posted on The Grio.
