Ye, the Omega
To the Alpha of 2010s identity politics
Despite the frequent aesthetic reinventions of his art, Kanye West, or Ye as he now calls himself, has one enduring feature: for better or worse, he’s always said the quiet parts out loud.
The way most people have reacted to Ye’s recent anti-Semitic tirades—first, the clipped portions from Tucker Carlson’s program, then the Drink Champs podcast, and then on Lex Fridman’s podcast—are predictable. In the end, the reason why everyone is responding the way they are—with outrage and a desire to punish, however understandable—is both tragic and inevitable. Tragic, because the social and professional consequences that have resulted and will likely continue to result will just confirm what anti-Semites and anti-Semite-sympathetic folks already believe or at least suspect. And inevitable, because this is always how anti-Semitism has worked; negative consequences for anti-Semitism are baked into the conspiracy theories that fuel it. It’s a conspiracy within a conspiracy. “Cry too hard and you’re proving my point,” is how it goes and this is not a coincidence: it’s by design. While the core assumption of anti-Semitism—that Jews are dripping with dough, are all powerful, and wield untoward influence over society and yet at the same time are subhuman, unclean trash—is objectively self-contradictory and stupid, it’s a shockingly well-constructed type of bigotry that is, in and of itself, self-sustaining. Criticism begets confirmation which begets greater hatred or suspicion. Wash, rinse, repeat.
On the one hand this should not have to be explained, but on the other, it’s probably important to do so. The reason anti-Semitism—especially as explicitly expressed as it was by Ye—gets the reaction that it does is not because the Jews “dominate” anything. Even if that were true, it would require a lot of further presumptions that require a bigoted outlook on the world. The presumption that Jews would only act in their “community’s” best interest over their own individual, personal interest (or others’ interests altogether) is what is bigoted here—it presumes unity among Jews, it presumes shared interests, and it presumes power where it doesn’t necessarily exist, especially as a monolith. It’s exactly the same as thinking all white people or black people or Latino people or Asian people or even LGBTQ people are a monolith who only—only—act in their own “community’s” self-interest. None of these things is inherently true and only people who see the world in terms of in-group loyalty and out-group suspicion see things that way. In other words, bigots and morons; no political characterization necessary since it crosses ideological lines.
The truth of the matter is that the last, at-scale expression of Jew-hatred resulted in six million of them being slaughtered like insects and shot like rabid dogs. And that crushing, evil, vividly-known reality is within living memory. It’s in living memory with literally thousands of people. This is going to sound harsh, but this is why any serious conversation about reparations for slavery in the United States is going to hit a brick wall that the conversation about Holocaust memory was never going to. Putting aside logistical differences and inevitable moral debates that could be had over these two very different horrors from our semi-recent pasts, the reality is that too much time, practically speaking, has passed with the former and hardly any, in the grand scheme, has passed with the latter. When it comes down to it, living memory is the cut off point for any type of reparation or even meaningful forgiveness. If these comments made by Ye were made 100 years from now (and something like these comments probably will be made because antisemitism is indeed nothing if not durable), then I do not believe for a second that there would have been as much of an outcry. This is also perhaps controversial to say, but this is primarily why I’ve never fully bought into the claims of “never again”—something already challenged by the world’s large indifference to similar outrages that have happened in the nearly eight decades since the end of the Shoah, from East Timur to Darfur.
In the end, that is why the reaction to Ye’s comments have been so harsh and swift. Not because they were self-evidently bigoted—though they were, I suppose thankfully, seen that way by many. But rather because, despite our pretty terrible historical memories in the United States, we are able to contextualize the logical end-point of such bigotries in a concrete, historically memorable way. And yet, if the roots of Ye’s comments—the quiet part he was saying out loud—were as self-evidently bigoted as they were rightfully perceived, then this kind of talk could have been headed off at the pass years ago.