Kanye West and the N-word on Twitter- UPDATE

After reading Steve Krakauer’s account of Kanye West’s outburst at last night’s MTV Video Music Awards, along with some priceless celebrity reactions, I was on Twitter when this tweet caught my eye. Hip-hop writer and “Media Assassin” Harry Allen, re-tweeting another tweep named Lemekh, had this to say:

No, White People: Tell Us What You Really Think Of Kanye West. http://twurl.nl/c5em6g [via @LemekH]about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck

The link is to a Twitter search of the words “Kanye” and “N***er.”

By the time I saw this, the search was dominated by re-tweets of people condemning the use of the word, so I paged all the way back to the first instance, and worked my way forward. There were lots of vile tweets from obvious racists, the most rewteeted one being this particularly disgusting one, but also from white people who claimed not to be racist, who seem to feel they’ve been granted permission by Chris Rock, or something, to use that word to describe “one of the bad ones.” Rock has since clarified the rules on this, which are not all that different from my own.

There were also lots of tweets from black people, mainly to express the feeling that West was making all black people look bad.

While it hasn’t hit the top of today’s trending topics, the search has been widely re-tweeted.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling out racists. It should probably be done more often. I’m sure, however, that any reasonable person would agree that calling this trend what “White people really think of Kanye” is overly broad, to say the least. While any vile, hateful, and even violent tweets are wholly unacceptable, ascribing them to all white people is obviously unfair. I emailed Harry for a comment on this article, and I’m awaiting his response.

What I also found interesting was the fact that Lemekh, the man who originated Allen’s tweet, and who cataloged many examples on his twitter feed, seems to have no problem using anti-gay slurs.

The takeaway here is that, when it comes to bigotry, we always have a little farther to go than we think we do.

Update: In response to my tweeted query, “Harry, you’re a writer, are we that type?” Harry Allen responds:

@djkoolchris @TommyXtopher D.B.T.H.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck

That’s “Don’t believe the hype.” So, either Harry was answering that question the way he responds to every Public Enemy fan who asks that, or he read my story and I made my point.

Update 2: Harry Allen blogs at length on this issue.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.