Kanye slavery claim slammed

The hip-hop star Kanye West has crowned a fortnight of increasingly provocative outbursts by suggesting that Africanamericans conspired in their own enslavement.

‘‘When you hear about slavery for 400 years – 400 years? – that sounds like a choice,’’ the rapper told the gossip news website TMZ. ‘‘Like, you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all? It’s like we’re mentally in prison.’’

Van Lathan, a black TMZ employee and host of a news and pop culture podcast, told West that he was ‘‘appalled ... unbelievably hurt’’ by the comments.

He said that while the musician had earned a life of comfort, privilege and artistic freedom ‘‘by being a genius’’ there was a ‘‘real-life consequence behind everything you just said’’ and other black people ‘‘have to deal with the marginalisation that has come from 400 years of slavery’’.

Yesterday the film director Spike Lee called West ‘‘uneducated’’ and urged him to ‘‘wake up’’ following the latest in a string of statements that have dismayed the musician’s liberal fans but enraptured conservative freespeech proponents.

West, the middle-class son of a Black Panther father and a mother who taught at a historically black university, said in 2006 during a telethon for Hurricane Katrina victims that ‘‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people’’.

He is married to the reality television personality Kim Kardashian West and has two albums out next month.

West’s newfound supporters on the right argue that in staking his right to ‘‘independent thought’’ and repeatedly touting his support for President Donald Trump, the multiplatinum-selling artist is daring to challenge a leftleaning entertainment industry consensus and the assumption that the black vote is a safe Democratic constituency.

In the 2016 election, exit polls suggested that Trump won only 8 per cent of the black vote. Donald Trump Jr has hailed the rapper’s backing for his father as a ‘‘cultural turning point’’.

The president has called it ‘‘very cool’’ and praised West for performing ‘‘a great service to the black community’’.

West later tweeted: ‘‘Of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will.

‘‘My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved.’’

He also spoke this week of his breakdown in 2016.

He told iheart Radio that he was not scared of having another, although he thought at the time that he would die. – The Times