Making
fun of Kanye West for having a ginormous ego is a national pastime in
the United States. Everyone's been at it lately, from Jimmy Kimmel to
President
Obama. Because I'm an inveterate contrarian and a consummate
overthinker, I want to weigh in on this, spurred by insights from
Ayesha
A. Siddiqi's marvelous series of tweets on racism's role in
responses to Kanye. I argue that not only is “I
am a God” theologically defensible, it's a critical moment in
Kanye's black theology – a black theology that white America really
needs to heed and learn from.
“I am a God” is
theologically defensible
In my WASP-y context,
we don't usually say this out loud, but if your Christology is as
high as mine it's true. In Christ, we are made divine; so as
a believer, as part of the Church which is the body of Christ,
Kanye is (a) God. For the
dominant groups in society, that's not really something to brag
about, because it ends up conflating church and empire into idolatry
– I have no time at all for John Lennon's claim to be bigger than
Jesus – but for marginalized people, it is a powerful way to
reclaim agency and pride in the face of systemic forces that try to
strip you of both. Kanye is quite open about the fact that the
inflated West ego is a construct that helps him battle depression and
self-loathing, demons that for him are entangled with and exacerbated
by the systemic racism he faces daily as a black man in the United
States.
Posing
as the face of Jesus is an audacious statement, and – contrary to
the kneejerk denunciations of blasphemy – is deeply rooted in
Kanye's self-identification as a Christian. The Christian's ontology
is a constant oscillation between the power to do all things through
Christ (Philippians 4:13), and the fact that this power is sourced in
and only in Jesus. This ongoing, dynamic destabilization is found in
Kanye's career and public face, between the empowerment of “I Am A
God” and the cry de profundis of “Jesus Walks” (my
favorite Kanye song, and, IMO, some of the best theology you will
ever hear in three minutes of popular culture).
Kanye's Black
theology
Kanye's
reclamation of the face of Jesus from a white supremacist society is
a statement of a black theology in the vein of James
Cone. Cone's Black Jesus is squarely on the side of the oppressed
against the oppressor, redeeming both Jesus and blackness from a
white supremacy that has distorted both. The black theological
tradition of which Kanye is a part also includes the womanist
theology of Kelly Brown Douglas, who rejects the theology of
submission as more harmful than useful to black women today, and
instead proudly affirms the subaltern
Kanye's is also a
deeply embodied black theology, squarely embedded in the physicality
of being a black man and how that challenges white supremacy: most
especially when it comes to sexuality, so often a source of terror
for white people (especially white women). Sexuality and (black
liberationist) spirituality are entwined throughout Kanye's oeuvre,
as in “Hell of
a Life” – “No more drugs for me / Pussy and religion is all
I need” – or the controversial “Put my fist in her like a civil
rights sign” line from “I'm
In It.” Or consider the couplet “I
wanna fuck you hard on the sink / After that, give you something to
drink” in “Bound
2,” which carries certain Eucharistic resonances in the midst
of a verse that mentions Christmas, church steps, and the wonderful
line, “After all these long-ass verses / I'm tired, you tired,
Jesus wept.”
Of course, there's an
incredibly problematic reduction of women to sex objects in a lot of
this, but white guys calling out black guys for sexism is all too
often at best paternalistic and at worst straight-up racist, so I'll
direct your attention to this
wonderful roundtable of insights by seven women. For now, let's
focus on the upside: he's affirming his right as a black man to exist
in a white supremacist society, to take up physical space in the
world, to be a fully realized human being who is proudly sexual (in
the face of centuries of demonizing black men's sexuality), proudly
rich and famous (in the face of systemic material oppression), justly
proud of his talent (in the face of a white entertainment industry
that seeks to belittle him while simultaneously elevating white men
of far less talent who have done despicable things).
And make no mistake,
Kanye is a transcendentally talented human being. I truly believe he
is the premier artiste of our
time, a man whose boundless creativity speaks to the spirit of the
age, whose gloriously eclectic taste in samples shatters all the
walls we try to erect between “original” and “derivative”
work.
Kanye is a public
theologian
Kanye
doesn't just rap his theology, he lives it. Whether declaring on live
TV that the president doesn't care about black people, or taking the
mic from the person most emblematic of US whiteness in order to speak
up for a similarly godlike black musician, Kanye's not afraid to
speak truth to power, and what does he get for it? White America's
ridicule.
Instead
of mocking this impossibly talented, awesomely provocative artist, we
should be analyzing why
exactly
we find his theology so challenging. When we find ourselves calling
him arrogant, he reminds us: For a black man in a racist society,
what's the difference between humility and servility?
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One
of Kanye's outstanding analytical talents is his connection of the
personal with the systemic. As much as modern US society tries to
maintain the public-private split, Kanye unveils the untenability of
that distinction and the ways in which it functions to maintain an
oppressive status quo. This makes him the foremost public theologian
of the early twenty-first century, and on some level it truly does
make him (a) God.
