Here is some incisive and insightful commentary from WFMU’s Doug Shulkind on the recent Kanye West imbroglio (a subject I never once thought this blahg would broach):
The entire event seemed preconceived: The staging appeared blocked; the camera angles locked in; the Hollywood happy-ending scripted as if drawn up on a lunch napkin at Spago. Even more telling is that all involved had so much to gain: Kanye re-upped his bad-boy bona fides; Taylor got boosted into the pop-star stratosphere; Beyoncé cemented her status as the #1 one-name überdiva. Of course the increasingly irrelevant music biz profited most of all.
Set piece or not, what’s truly disturbing about this third-rate melodrama is how the roles played by its three principals conjure those familiar old racist paradigms: 1) Angry black man; 2) innocent white ingenue (menaced by angry black man); 3) benevolent black mama (who cuts the black man down to size, reassuring the white power structure).
The detestable irony in all this is the unwitting involvement of President Obama, whose “jackass” comment only served to legitimize these standard-issue racial stereotypes. Is it any surprise that his off-the-record utterance was leaked? How better to cut our African-American-in-Chief down to size.
The whole thing was a trap. The extent to which we as a collective culture lock-stepped so willingly into its steel teeth suggests that that there are still many more miles to cover in the backwoods of the American soul before coming home for some steaming post-racial porridge.
Was there actually ever any doubt that this was a publicity stunt? When every MTV awards show has some “surprise” event to generate chatter, one needn’t bother actually analyzing evidence to know that it’s preconceived.
Fair enough, but I think the larger point about race relations is where the analyzing of evidence comes/came in handy.