After Kanye West told TMZ, “When you hear about slavery for 400 years, for 400 years? That sound like a choice,” Blair LM Kelley, a history professor at North Carolina State University, added some historical context to the claims.
Kanye said slavery was a choice huh? So, so disrespectful.
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 1, 2018
Haven’t watched the whole Kanye event today, working my way up to it. I will say, that a milder version of the “slavery is a choice” argument is made by uninformed people all the time. I’ve had young men in my courses say “they never would have enslaved me.”
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
People aren’t aware of the alienation of people ripped from their homes, abused, walked hundreds of miles across Africa, sometimes so far they ceased understanding the language spoken around them…
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
People don’t know the brutality of the slave castles were people were held on the coasts, branded still holding out hope for escape, or reconnection with loved one….
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
Could they have survived the devastation of the middle passage, packed less humanely than animals below the deck of the ship, chained to people who were sick and dying?
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
Could they have survived being sold like a good at market by people in a foreign land speaking a foreign tongue? Could they have survived torturous work, in scraps of clothing eating the food that was unwanted?
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
Not only did my ancestors and Kanye’s ancestors survive, they managed to make a way to make a new culture, remake family and faith. And in the process, make a culture so formidable that it continues to change the world.
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
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.
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
Denigrating their lives at this point for attention and spare change is such an embarrassment.
— Blair LM Kelley (@profblmkelley) May 2, 2018
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