Don Lemon Delivers A Reality Check Response To Kanye West, Advises The Rapper To Read Books

BTR News (USA) – CNN’s Don Lemon had a sharp rebuke of the illiteracy of Kanye West on the subject of slavery being a simple matter of “choice”. Lemon in a dialogue with another CNN host said,  “Kanye needs to realize it’s not a binary choice: you can remember your history, and you can also achieve. It doesn’t have to hold you there.”

He encouraged the music producer to travel to the West African countries where victims of the Trans-Atlantic Human Slave Trade were housed. Lemon described the awful experience of walking through the horrid conditions the victims were forced to endure and what it must have been like for the millions who would walk through those doors forced into a life of complete servitude to cruel human traffickers on the colonized regions of North America, South America and the island chain known as the Carribean. Lemon encouraged West to “pick up a history book” perhaps referencing rumors that Kanye doesn’t read books of any sort.

Don Lemon prefaced his comments by saying he doesn’t want to cast aspersions but Kanye is going through something but he did not say specifically what problems the rapper may be experiencing. Kanye himself has announced publicly that he experienced opioid addiction and among the side effects listed by the medical community is hypoxia. Hypoxia is when your respiratory system isn’t working within your body properly to process oxygen which can result in brain damage. The degree of the damage would, of course, vary among users depending on the quantity of opioids times the length of the addiction. Don Lemon did not want to publically label West as a brain-damaged former addict to dismiss his ridiculously absurd comment on slavery being a choice.

Without casting aspersions on Kanye’s West’s family but how much does he really know about the heritage of his wife Kim Kardashian whose Armenian heritage and knowledge of it was imparted to her and her siblings by their late father Robert Kardashian. Has Kanye and Kim had a conversation on teaching the chapters of Armenian and Afro-American history to their multi-cultural children?

The Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration was built on the site of a former warehouse in Montgomery, Alabama, where enslaved black people were imprisoned, and is located midway between an historic slave market and the main river dock and train station where tens of thousands of enslaved people were trafficked during the height of the domestic slave trade. Montgomery’s proximity to the fertile Black Belt region, where slaveowners amassed large enslaved populations to work the rich soil, elevated Montgomery’s prominence in domestic trafficking, and by 1860, Montgomery was the capital of the domestic slave trade in Alabama, one of the two largest slave-owning states in America.

It seems Kanye is planning on denying teaching his children’s Afro-American heritage and history to them, will he object if Kim teaches them the Armenian side of their history and heritage?

The Armenian Genocide, also known as the Armenian Holocaust, was the Ottoman government’s systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, mostly citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state, the Republic of Turkey.

I wonder was Kanye aware that Kim Kardashian was reportedly a very vocal Armenian activist using her platform in part to spread awareness about their history including the Armenian genocide that started in 1915 during WWI? Is anyone behind the scenes explaining to Kanye that victims of the historical crimes against humanity did not make choices that are to blame for whatever crime was done to whatever particular group? Is anyone telling him that his comments are very bad for business because they are so obviously bizarre and offensive?  Let’s pray for Kanye’s full recovery from his opioid addiction, I don’t know how severe it was or is but he is certainly kind of confused in this “free thinking” on the matter.

Black Talk Media Project founder Scotty Reid is the host of BTR News and New Abolitionists Radio which he co-hosts. He has been hosting and producing news talk radio and podcasting since 2007 and has interviewed hundreds of guests on various topics. He is also a freelance writer who focuses on social and political issues from around the world and has been published by various outlets. Check the podcast feed for recent posts.