Brooke Obie’s List of Books to Read to NOT Be Kanye West on Slavery
Check out my latest article on THE ROOT:
Kanye West doesn’t care about books.
If he hadn’t said as much in a 2009 Reuters interview, where he labeled himself a “proud nonreader of books,” we’d still know about his breathless commitment to ignorance just by listening to his latest rants blaming black people for crime, the Democratic Party and—most disgusting of all—slavery:
At one point during the conversation, Kanye said, “When you hear about slavery for 400 years … for 400 years? That sound like a choice.
“Like … you was there for 400 years and it’s all of y’all?” he asked incredulously.
Kanye gone, y’all.
And those who aren’t ready to accept it are reaching out, flashing their cameras in a desperate attempt to get him out of the sunken place. When John Legend tried to school him in love, Ye simply plastered screenshots of Legend’s text messages all over his infamous Twitter feed as proof that he’s being “attacked” and folks are trying to “manipulate” him with facts.
If there’s one thing my amazing black female therapist has taught me over our months of work, it’s how to recognize a brick wall. Kanye isn’t ready to learn or grow or read.
Open letters from fans begging the old Kanye to come back will go unanswered. Self-reflection will continue to evade him. And, so, this list of “Essential Books to Not Be Kanye West About American Slavery” isn’t for him. He should read them. Maybe, when he’s ready, he will, but it’s definitely not for him right now.
Right now, this list is for anyone who’s ever thought, “If I were alive during slavery, I would’ve … ”
It’s for anyone who spent his or her hard-earned money on those laughable “I’m not my ancestors; you will catch these hands” T-shirts.
It’s for anyone who is “tired of all these slave movies” when there’s been, like, three in the past decade and you still can’t name a single enslaved person beyond Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.
It’s for anyone who’s ever thought, “If the Haitians [pronounced like Cher does in Clueless] could get free, why couldn’t we?”
It’s for anyone who was a grown adult before they ever learned that there was a woman named Ona “Oney” Judge who escaped from the first president of the United States, lived to tell about it and remained free even after George Washington relentlessly pursued her.
If you didn’t know about Oney until just now? This list is definitely for you. Because it was for me, first.
I was 27 before I accidentally found out about Oney on Google while researching for the novel I wrote that reimagines the ending of American slavery.
The more I read about the history of enslaved people in America, the daily acts of resistance, both violent and nonviolent (in the form of feigning illnesses, breaking tools, “forgetting” essentials), the angrier I became that this critical information had been erased from my curriculums, diluted and falsified with illustrations of smiling black folks picking cotton, and ideas about “kind” enslavers who treated those they enslaved “like family.”
There is no excuse for Kanye West. Even if his English-professor mother hadn’t taught him about slavery (which I’m sure she did); even if he hadn’treceived a personal guided tour of the National Museum of African American History and Culture when it opened (which he definitely did), he could still afford to pay a tutor to teach him Slavery 101.
That’s not all of our story, though. So this list is for those of us who know what we don’t know and want to change that. This is for those who are angry enough about the intentional misinformation about slavery that we’ve all ingested—angry enough to act or, at the very least, to read.
May these books show you that the shame of slavery was never on black people to hold, but the glory to come is ours: