MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude Jr. said Tuesday on “Deadline” that rapper Kanye West’s antisemitic comments were about the crisis of white identity.
Glaude said, “We live in a celebrity culture, and we saw this with the four years of Donald Trump, right when we live in a celebrity culture that’s driven by social media, driven by Instagram and these kinds of micro-reality shows, it supercharges hate. When a celebrity picks it up, mouths it, gives it authority, justifies it, legitimizes it. So it’s very clear what people like Kanye can do with their power deployed for good or deployed for evil in some ways. So, I think we have to be clear about how celebrities distorts and disfigures how democracy works.”
He added, “It’s also interesting to me, in that it’s the way in which whiteness is, ironically, even with Kanye is, consolidating itself. Because anti-semitism, alongside of white lives matter, all of this is bound up with a crisis of a particular kind of identity and how certain communities are the objects of it, the objects of the violence. There’s a reason why Tree of Life, and Buffalo and El Paso are all related. It has something to do with a crisis of a particular understanding of white identity. You don’t have to be white to participate in it. That’s the complexity and irony of it. It seems to me.”
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