Dear Kanye, This Is What Happens To Actual Black Free Thinkers

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Kanye West is a black man. He is not a free thinker.

Muhammad Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and banned from boxing for four year after refusing to fight in a war that only served to kill innocent people.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in cold blood after a lifetime of harassment and threats from the American government. He wanted a world where everyone was created equal.

Zora Neale Hurston died penniless because she chose to live a life dedicated to writing to and for black people.

Colin Kaepernick still does not have a job in the NFL after protesting unjust killings of black people in America.

Sandra Bland was murdered in jail for daring to question why she was being arrested by a police officer.

Medgar Evers was gunned down in front of his own home for his organizing and Civil Rights work in Mississippi.

Harriet Tubman was beaten and had to escape death on a daily basis for fighting for the freedom of slaves across the country.

Tupac. Angela Davis. Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf. Malcolm X. And on. And on. And on.

This is what happens to black free thinkers.

Kanye West and the people who are too cowardly to fully reconcile with the ignorant anti-blackness he’s been spouting have decided to rally behind the idea that they are “free thinkers,” and that somehow parroting alt-right hate speech is some form of unprecedented independent thought. This, of course, is nonsense. Kanye West is not a black free thinker. He doesn’t even understand the meaning and weight that such a distinction carries.

Kanye West – like Stacey Dash, Ben Carson, Ray Lewis, Clarence Thomas and far too many others – represent the opposite of free thinking. They have traded in the courage of actual free thought and instead have decided to sell their souls. All to appease white supremacists who magnify these black sellouts as vehicles for perpetuating racism and anti-black violence. The same white people who suddenly love Kanye West so much will keep him around as long as he serves the purpose of making them feel right in their supremacy. They will hold him as a righteous example right up until that exact moment when he is no longer useful to their agenda and he is summarily discarded. Then he will be left with no other option but to beg for the love and attention from the same people he turned his back on in his pursuit of the superficial, loveless embrace of whiteness. And in that moment, when the white people he loves so much push him aside for the next tap-dancing spectacle willing to go even farther into the depths of self-hate and self-destruction, he’ll realize just how bad he f***ed up. By then too much damage will have been done for him to return to the black people who loved him when he was too black to be loved by anyone else. And he’ll then be forced to live in a lonely purgatory of irrelevance where he performs his minstrelsy for an audience of one. Himself.

This is the fate of a fool who thinks himself a black free thinker but doesn’t have the capacity to be one.

Kanye West is not a free thinker.