“There is Kanye West.” “I don’t know if he wanted this type of attention.” “He’s at the center of a hashtag.” Kanye West made what might have been his most controversial statement to date during an interview with TMZ. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years — for 400 years? That sounds like a choice.” But historians reject this argument. Here’s why. Kanye’s idea is rooted in misconceptions about slaves being complacent. It also ignores the history of slave resistance. “The enslaved Africans resisted persistently in a number of different ways. Whether not working as hard as they could to something as widespread as a slave revolt. And so the biggest misunderstanding of slavery is this dominant idea, during slavery and after slavery, of the docile enslaved African.” And while he has tried to portray his latest comment as revolutionary free thought — “Do you feel that I’m being free and I’m thinking free?” — far from being new or revolutionary, the idea that slaves were complicit in keeping up with slavery is age old. Prof. Kendi: “The ideas that he is sharing are actually quite old. There was a very prominent post-slavery theory that black people were not resisting enslavement because they recognized that enslavement was better for them. That really lasted, even among scholars who wrote about slavery, well into the 1940s and 1950s.” By repeating the narrative that enslaved people were docile Kanye works to blame the oppressed for what happened to them. It puts all the responsibility on the individual and ignores systemic inequality. Today, the conservative ideology of individualism and “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” follows a similar pattern. “People want to call it systemic racism. No!” “It wasn’t what they were doing to me, it’s what I wasn’t doing.” “You do not have to sit around and wait for somebody else to do things for you.” Prof. Kendi: “According to this body of thought racial disparities exist and persist because black people haven’t taken personal responsibility for their lives, because there’s something wrong with them, because they’re enslaved to the welfare state, and they refuse to resist in the way they refuse to resist to the slaveholder.” This thinking allows Kanye to claim his own success. But by using his platform to share historically inaccurate information, he makes people believe that things in the past would have played out differently had they been there. It glosses over the real violence and suffering of slavery, and it muddles accountability.