"I want to tell you a story about the time, still ongoing as of this writing, when I almost lost my mind," writes Ta-Nehisi Coates.

"In the summer of 2015, I published a book, and in so doing, became the unlikely recipient of a mere fraction of the kind of celebrity Kanye West enjoys. It was small literary fame.... My life had been inconsequential, if slightly amusing. I had never stood out for any particular reason, save my height, and even that was wasted on a lack of skills on the basketball court. But I learned to use this ordinariness to my advantage. I was a journalist. There was something soft and unthreatening about me that made people want to talk. And I had a capacity for disappearing into events and thus, in that way, reporting out a scene..... Fame fucked with all of that... It was the oddest thing. I felt myself to be the same as I had always been, but everything around me was warping. My sense of myself as part of a community of black writers disintegrated before me. Writers, whom I loved, who had been mentors, claimed tokenism and betrayal. Writers, whom I knew personally, whom I felt to be comrades in struggle, took to Facebook and Twitter to announce my latest heresy.... I remember going with a friend to visit an older black writer, an elder statesman. He sized me up and the first thing he said to me was, 'You must be getting all the pussy now.' What I felt, in all of this, was a profound sense of social isolation. I would walk into a room, knowing that some facsimile of me, some mix of interviews, book clubs, and private assessment, had preceded me. The loss of friends, of comrades, of community, was gut-wrenching. I grew skeptical and distant. I avoided group dinners. In conversation, I sized everyone up, convinced that they were trying to extract something from me. And this is where the paranoia began...."

From "I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye/Kanye West wants freedom—white freedom" (The Atlantic). The headline seems off, based on that excerpt, doesn't it? A lot of the article is about Michael Jackson, and how fame wrecked him, and of course, the visible wreckage had something to do with whiteness. But Coates is using his own experience with fame to understand Kanye West, and what do Coates and West have to do with a desire to be white? I assume Coates didn't write the headline, but I did search the article for "white" to find something that was about Kanye. Here:

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

Ooh! Wow. That's all one sentence. I had to read it out loud to try to absorb the part where we can understand why West's idea of freedom is specifically white. It didn't work. Maybe because I'm white and that's making me think that complete freedom is every human being's birthright and that it would be racist to tell black people to adhere to a prescribed black form of freedom.

Other questions: Who was the black elder statesman who said "You must be getting all the pussy now" to Ta-Nehisi Coates and how did Ta-Nehisi Coates react at the time and why? And how tall is Ta-Nehisi Coates and does he really believe that tallness is wasted if not used for basketball? There are so many uses for tallness, or maybe I only think so because I'm white.