Kanye West and us It's too easy to attribute all of Kanye's mistakes solely to his psychiatric condition

The slogan of "White Lives Matter" first appeared on the American scene starting in 2015. Made popular by the Texas-based white supremacist group Aryan Renaissance Society (whose name alone would be enough to explain its principles), it then spread among various smaller groups affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The slogan originated as a violent counterpart to Black Lives Matters, the BLM movement that had invaded American streets after the murders of first Trayvon Martin and then Eric Garner. White Live Matters was often talked about, although the slogan rarely crossed the U.S. border. At least until Kanye West came along. 

Not every story has good guys and bad guys, and this is one of them. The Kanye West we are getting to know today is nothing more than an extremely exaggerated version of the one we have always known, which can be recognized from the images of jeen yuhs, the documentary that chronicles his rise. It is too easy to trace all of Kanye's wrong attitudes always and only to his certified mental illness; just as, however, it is journalistically insane to find ourselves here every time Kanye West says something more wrong than the previous time. Maybe times are different, but between "Slavery was a choice" and "BLM was a scam" there is not that much difference after all. The mainstream media built a platform of resonance around Kanye that suited everyone, a platform that was fueled by the most banal artistic rhetorical device ever: genius and unruliness. Today Kanye has gone beyond that, the dross of Virgil Abloh's death and the void of all that Virgil stood for are just gasoline on a fire that could not be avoided and that was started at the same time that Kanye West changed the fashion world, turning it inside out like a sock, and forcing everyone to play the same game he did. 

Moral judgments about Kanye West are of course immediate; what we perhaps need to question are moral judgments about ourselves. We allowed - rightly or wrongly - that this was Kanye West's world and we strongly wanted to be part of it. Today that world is burning and its flames may not be so easy to tame precisely because it is not just about Kanye West, it is about us.