Diem Perdidi
Kanye West is white America’s worst nightmare. Because as much as one may attempt to dismiss him — by calling him an asshole or classless or deranged or various other adjectives that fill the comment sections of literally every article about him — you still have to turn on your regularly scheduled late night comedy program and stare him in the face. You can’t avoid Kanye. He’s made very sure of that.
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Kanye is not a “new slave” in the same sense as the victims of the prison industrial complex, but he is still trapped in a world that expects him to not only be complicit with the struggle of his people, but to be appreciative that he is not one of them. And on top of all that, while he gets to exist in the world of the 1%, having the money and signifiers of success still aren’t enough to make his (white) 1% peers actually even respect him.
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The ideals of Public Enemy are as relevant today as they were in the 80s, but hip-hop was nowhere near as dominant and omnipresent a cultural force as it is at this moment; to compare the reach of their messages is silly. Upper-middle class white families did not have to deal with Public Enemy if they didn’t want to. Similarly with politically-minded “noise rap” artists that have been name-dropped in reviews of Kanye’s new material — it’s all well and good for Death Grips and Blackie and even Killer Mike to espouse similar messages and sounds (and honestly, the sonic qualities of “New Slaves” and “Black Skinhead” are hardly at the top of the list of why they’re important), but none of them have anywhere near the amount of visibility and influence as Kanye, even if they did hit it first.
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People in current positions of comfort and stability are so willing to dismiss the transgressive thoughts of an angry black man that they will use any convenient excuse to diminish from them; if someone says something that makes you uncomfortable, why not immediately change the subject to his girlfriend’s ass or that time he yelled at a papparazzi or that time he got drunk and embarrassed a white girl? When was it exactly that Kanye shifted, in the eyes of the mainstream, from lovable polo-wearing backpacker to perpetually and unanimously An Asshole? When, precisely, did everything he said get immediately categorized as a “rant” or “controversial” regardless of the actual content? I want to say it was around the time when he said that George Bush didn’t care about black people on live tv. Hmm. Odd.
"The anguish is clear on the face of Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, who takes long pauses in an attempt to steady his tearful voice, as he recounts to the interviewer about how American interrogators repeatedly raped and tortured, or pretended to rape and torture, a woman in the cell next to him in an attempt to force him to falsely confess.
Begg’s eyes cloud over and he stares off into the distance as he relates how they manipulated his biggest fear, that his wife and children who were with him at the time of his arrest, were also imprisoned and in danger:
“I heard the cries of a woman (in the cell next to me) and an American voice shouting, ‘Spread your legs!’ and the woman is screaming and crying (as if she is being raped). Before I used to (always) ask the Americans about what happened to my wife and children since my arrest. They said ‘We don’t know,’ but at this time I didn’t ask because I was afraid of the answer. I thought my wife was in the cell.”
Begg was tortured and assaulted physically, mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and sexually as the American interrogators tried “breaking him down” in order to make him sign false confessions. Begg was released after three years spent in US custody without any charges held against him.
It is still not clear to this day whether the woman in the cell next to him was a fellow inmate also unjustly prisoned or an interrogator posing as a woman in distress.
It is known but hardly ever reported that the United States detains (Muslim) women who they “suspect” of being terrorists for no apparent reason, an example being Dr. Aafia Siddiqui (shown below in a picture of her taken while in US custody) who was abducted with her children by US intelligence.
After severe mistreatment in custody, during which she sustained a gunshot wound, Siddiqui was sentenced to 84 years in prison. Her young children who were with her when she was kidnapped and subsequently detained and interrogated have only recently been relocated. Siddiqui’s youngest son, who hadn’t even started walking yet, has disappeared since her kidnapping with no hint whatsoever of his whereabouts. Her older son has claimed that “the bloody body of his baby brother” was tossed to the side of the road by US soldiers when Siddiqui and her children were arrested. During her trial, Siddiqui was repeatedly removed from the court room for interrupting proceedings to scream out that her children had been tortured in front of her.
Four men who were imprisoned with Dr. Siddiqui in Bagram and who managed to escape reported in an interview:
“When they torture you, they threaten to sodomise you, they threaten to bring your wife and rape her in front of you and do other things to her. My words can never fully explain to you what happened during those interrogations.”
“Those American criminals think that they are the lords of human rights and that they are the callers for the freedom of the woman and her rescuers from oppression. There is a woman from Pakistan. She was put in solitary confinement for two full years in Bagram prison among more than 500 male prisoners and guards. She was treated the same way as the men were. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming day and night.”
(via twentysomethinghussy)
