A couple of weeks ago, Kanye West re-emerged in public life with a string of tweets. He began with empty, harmless affirmations on creativity, love and fear, but in a matter of days, he ventured into politics. And not in the way longtime followers might have expected.

For much of his career, West presented himself as an unabashed capitalist with black nationalist leanings. His critiques of racism were never radical, but they were pointed.



Now West appears to have made a rightward turn. Last week, he shared a picture of himself wearing one of President Donald Trump’s signature Make America Great Again hats and hailed the conservative pundit Candace Owens as a thought leader he admires.



In one tweet, West claimed: “I haven’t done enough research on conservatives to call myself or be called one,” but when he sat down with TMZ on Tuesday, he embraced a core value of modern conservatism: our lives are primarily the product of our choices.



The interview’s most dismaying moment came when West attempted to apply this thinking to those who endured chattel slavery in the United States. Seemingly out of nowhere he said: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years? That sounds like a choice.”



This language of personal responsibility is popular among rightwing black Americans. Last year, the US housing secretary, Ben Carson, said poor children needed the “mindset of a winner” to better their circumstances, and Candace Owens regularly admonishes Black Lives Matter supporters for succumbing to a “victim mentality” that focuses on a discriminatory past and present.



But “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” rhetoric crumbles quickly in full view of the historical record and decades of social science research on inequality. West’s words reference a version of history that paints the enslaved as docile and lazy – a version that is categorically untrue.



Blair LM Kelley, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, summarized the determination of slaves in a tweet: “Slavery wasn’t their choice at any step. We know that freedom was always their choice, resistance was their choice when they couldn’t escape.”



According to Kelley, historians have found evidence of more than 200 mass slave revolts from the colonial period to the civil war, and thousands of enslaved people attempted to escape by running away. Despite efforts to resist the peculiar institution, it persisted.



Yet West has inadvertently highlighted the absurdity of the right’s preoccupation with individual choice. A black person’s decisions might ameliorate the effects of racism, but they do not change structures that are designed to ensure failure. That was true before emancipation and it is true now.

Consider a report from the Center for American Progress that found the median wealth for black households with a college degree was only about 70% of the median wealth of white households without a college degree. Doing things the “right” way offers no guarantees.



Perhaps Kanye West is so removed from the everyday struggles of most black Americans that he cannot understand this. Or, perhaps, after a year of personal struggle, a political viewpoint that emphasizes how one might be able to take control of one’s life is appealing.



Whatever the case, as a person with a huge platform and near limitless resources, it is Kanye’s responsibility to avoid spreading misinformation.

