Maya Angelou X KanYe West (Thread)

So I was reading ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’ by Maya Angelou the other day and I came across a line that particularly drew my attention. The thing it has in common with KanYe West is controversy about Harriet Tubmann’s actions in regards to slavery and their results.

Before we get to the bottom of this, here is the context :

As you all probably know, KanYe West made very ambigious comments about Harriet Tubmann’s freeing of the slaves at his first presidential rally in South Carolina that received a lot of backlash from the public and the media.

After KanYe made this comment and started getting overly emotional, people put all the blame on his mental health problems as he is public known to suffer from bi-polar disorder, nullifying his entire speech because of that one opinion they disagreed with.

Well, it is almost normal to think that way of KanYe West’s comment given his mental state but because of this attitude, people have developed a habit of blaming every controversial comment he ever makes on his bi-polarity, rendering them unable to analyse his views with no bias.

A future in which they could embrace whatever career they decided to regardless of their skin tone. Marguerite perfectly understood that, despite no longer being slaves to the naked eye, the whites had managed to psychologically enslave her people by offering them a false freedom

You can still disagree to all this and say that KanYe West is crazy, by the way.

So with that in mind, here is the line Maya Angelou wrote in ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings’ about Harriet Tubmann’s liberation of the slaves.

In this chapter, Marguerite Johnson, the main character and the narrator, is graduating from middle school and for the occasion, two white men were invited by the school to give a brief word of encouragement to the class of 1940. Only of them addressed the children.

He naturally congratulated them first and then started to tell the audience how proud he was to tell (white) people that the best sportsman in the region had graduated in that very school. He longly babbled over that specific topic and it particularly caught the girl’s attention.