Why So Many Rappers Pathologize Black Partisanship in the Democratic Party
Recent comments by Killer Mike, Kanye West, and Chance the Rapper show the dangerous appeal of conservative plantation theory beyond the echo chambers of right-wing media.
Kanye West spent much of last Wednesday atop Twitter’s trending topics list after posting a series of tweets in which he defended his love for President Donald Trump.
The bizarre string of tweets seemed to come in response to criticism the rapper received for tweeting out support for Candace Owens, a black conservative blogger who often posts disparaging commentary about black support for the Democratic Party. West claimed that as a freethinker he is open to all sorts of ideas, and that he could respect President Trump and his right-wing supporters without subscribing to their politics. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, defended him in her own string of tweets, claiming that her husband had a right to express his opinion.
In an apparent defense of West, Chance The Rapper also chimed in with a tweet insisting not all black people must identify as Democrats.
Several minutes later, West took a direct shot at former President Barack Obama.
Trump supporters predictably pounced on the opportunity to accuse West’s liberal detractors of being anti-free speech and intolerant of opposing views. In one post that was retweeted by the president’s son, Donald Trump, Jr., the author turned the tables on pro-racial justice liberals by mocking President Obama’s former speechwriter Jon Favreau for telling his followers to ignore Kanye West’s attention-seeking posts.
The political firestorm set off by Kanye West’s pro-Trump tweets occurred about a month after another rapper, Killer Mike, caught fire for appearing in an online NRA interview promoting black gun ownership. Like West, Killer Mike expressed frustration with the Democratic Party and hoped his support for the conservative NRA would spark a much-needed discussion about gun ownership across party and racial lines. And like Chance the Rapper, Killer Mike pretended to be clueless as to how his comments could be weaponized by the right to attack the left-leaning voters that make up much of his fan base.
None of these rappers would probably identify as Republicans, yet they all expressed the same criticism of black partisanship in the Democratic Party that Republicans have voiced for years. Often, Republicans draw upon the racist imagery of slaves toiling on the plantation to make their point.
As one columnist explained back in 2013, “The conservative plantation theory holds that African Americans support the Democratic party in exchange for welfare benefits and other handouts… [and] the Democratic party cultivates black welfare dependency in order to keep black voters firmly in their camp…”
While it remains a staple of conservative commentary, the echoes of plantation theory in black male celebrity commentary on the Democratic Party demonstrate the theory’s appeal beyond efforts to insulate Republican leaders from accusations of racism or indifference to black voters. Embracing the plantation theory has become a way for young black male stars to prove they are deserving of their newfound proximity to whiteness.
Black voters are not uniquely partisan
Most critiques of black partisanship in the Democratic Party are grounded in the false assumption that black voters are uniquely — if not pathologically — partisan voters. In reality, black Americans are not the only ethnic group in which the majority of its members vote consistently for one political party over another. Following the 2012 presidential election, the Republican National Committee published a report that showed grave concerns about the party’s inability to attract voters outside of its older, whiter base. In 2016, data journalists owed much of Donald Trump’s shocking electoral victory to working class whites, who went hard for Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other typically Democratic-leaning states after having steadily exited the Democratic Party for two decades. There’s simply no justification for singling out black voters for being partisans when voters in virtually every other ethnic group are, too.
But the core criticism of black partisanship in the Democratic Party coming from certain members of the rap community is that Democrats haven’t done anything to deserve loyalty from black voters. As Kanye West pointed out in his tweet attacking President Obama, in many Democratic strongholds such as Chicago, Illinois, the conditions for low-income black people remain the same in 2018 as they did when Obama first came to office in 2009. Others have decried President Obama’s failure to stave off the disintegration of black wealth during the Great Recession, when millions of black families loss their homes to foreclosure. And during the 2016 campaign, author Michelle Alexander penned a notorious piece in The Nation arguing that given Hillary Clinton’s support for her husband’s devastating policies on welfare and the war on drugs back in the 1990s, she did not deserve the black vote now.
As valid as these criticisms are of the Democratic Party (my piece on why the black left critique of the Democratic Party should be taken more seriously than it is by the party establishment can be found here), using them to conclude that black people’s interests are not being served by their loyalty to the party makes little sense.
For one, it’s unclear how Kanye West measures “change” in Chicago or in any other black city over the course of President Obama’s eight years in office. And West assumes it is always clear to voters which elected officials they should hold accountable at the ballot box for specific problems in their communities, and that voting for a different candidate in a different party will automatically produce better outcomes for their communities. In other words, it is not only unfair but disingenuous to argue that as president Barack Obama could have solved all the problems in a single city, and that simply voting for Republican mayors and congressmen instead of Democratic ones would have made these problems go away. Considering that the Trump administration’s response to the opioid epidemic in many working class white communities has been to advocate putting drug dealers on death row, there’s little reason for black voters in urban communities to give Republican politicians a chance.
Another problem with using President Obama’s policy failures to argue that black voters should abandon the Democratic Party is that voters don’t support a party based solely on a retrospective assessment of the party’s performance while in office. As political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels argue in their book Democracy for Realists, Americans’ partisan identities are shaped in large part by other group identities and attachments (race, gender, family history, etc). This is not to say that a president’s job performance or a party’s platform doesn’t matter to voters. Rather, it is often more important that Americans see parts of themselves in the candidates they support, and will mold their issue positions to fit the candidates they have already decided best reflect who they are. It is not surprising then, that black Americans would hold deep cultural attachments to the party that signed into law the Civil Rights Act and elected the first black president.
The purpose of the pathology
In many ways, the criticism of black partisanship in the Democratic Party amounts to concern-trolling. It allows white conservatives to blame black people for their own problems while appearing to care that these problems exist in the first place. The narrow focus on black partisanship also allows white conservatives to deflect from how their own partisanship in the GOP is structured by their opposition to the sorts of redistributive programs that would lead to greater equity between whites and blacks.
I suspect the conservative plantation theory appeals to young black men of means because at its core it is a celebration of mythical white individuality and self-sufficiency (positioned against the conformity and dependency of blackness) that Americans are taught they could have if they just work hard enough. Moreover, in a society that often gauges black men’s success by their access to white women and white wealth, the desire to distance oneself from black-dominated political institutions is even stronger.
In his support of President Trump, Kanye West probably believes he is challenging what it means to be black and political in ways that are long overdue, and there may be some truth to that given the media’s limited scope of black political thought. But expanding the range of ideas considered to be part of black politics doesn’t require shaming and scapegoating black people for whom the Democratic Party remains the primary point of access to the political world. It’s time rappers put the plantation theory out to pasture.
