Technology

That Time I Got Suspended On Twitter For Calling Kanye West An 'Uncle Tom' And Other Things

My first Twitter suspension is not a First Amendment issue, just a Twitter being stupid issue.

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(TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

I’ve been on Twitter for exactly nine years this month, and yesterday I was Twitter slapped for the very first time. Spending 12 hours in Twitter jail given the kinds of things I’ve been tweeting about for nine years is a ratio I can live with. But the suggestion that I had somehow violated community standards of discourse by standing against Kanye West’s rank coonery really pissed me off.

I guess I should back up. Yesterday Kanye West went on TMZ and said that slavery was a “choice.” The belief that African-American slaves were weak, defective cowards who chose enslavement over noble death has a long tradition among those who like to think that slaves (and some modern blacks) deserve their fate. The belief is not unique to some (idiot) African-Americans and American white supremacists. Across history, whenever there is a nearly unimaginable destruction of humans, later generations of the victimized group will always harbor a few youngsters who think that their parents or ancestors “deserved” it. It happens in the Jewish community where some Jews think that their people were too “docile” during the Holocaust. You can find Japanese-Americans who are ashamed of their parents who went “too quietly” to the internment camps. And always there is a cadre of oppressors who applaud these “free thinkers” who blame their ancestors for weakness as opposed to their tormentors for evil.

Kanye is just the latest (and currently, loudest) brother who is still enslaved and enthralled to the white man’s logic. Remember, that the slaves were too weak to “earn” their freedom and constitutionally unable to act free even if it was given to them was a key part of white supremacist logic. “Free thinking”? Please. This brother’s so ignorant that he’s dusting off some John C. Calhoun and passing it off like he thought this up himself. Kanye is going to have a lot of black defenders, because a lot of black people have and have always subscribed to the fundamental tenets of white supremacy: white men are “on top” because they’ve earned it, black people struggle because they deserve it. Trust me, if the GOP could just get through four full years without being openly racist, they’d easily pull 40% of the black vote. Black people are just as susceptible to the Prosperity Gospel con as anybody else.

Now… I could have said all of this into the void that is @kanyewest, but you’ll notice that it’s more than 240 characters. So instead I summarized my thoughts thusly (I did not take a screen shot of the tweet before they made me delete it, but I did copy and paste the text in pertinent part on Facebook):

Annnd… NOW I feel comfortable calling @kanyewest an Uncle Tom. He got upgraded to house Negro, and now dares to look down on the brothers still out in the field? Naw. That’s Tom school 101.

I tweeted that, posted a similar message on Facebook, and by the time I clicked back over the Twitter, my account had been suspended.

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So, a couple of things.

1. I don’t normally use the phrase “Uncle Tom.” It’s a phrase people use too casually. Not every or even many “black conservatives” are “Uncle Toms.” Not every black person who believes in a generally assimilationist strategy is an “Uncle Tom.” To me, a true Tom has to couple his enchantment with white culture (however defined) with a belief in white supremacy. A Tom isn’t just a lapdog for white people, he’s got to look down on black people who are not. He places himself superior to other black people based predominately on his association with white people.

… Which is pretty much exactly what Kanye is doing when he shucks and jives around in his MAGA hat.

2. A “house negro” also has a specific, historical context that I was invoking. I was not using “negro” as a cute way of saying the “n-word.” (In point of fact, I generally do not use the n-word. I am ALLOWED to, while most of you are NOT. But I have a bit of the Toofer problem: I can’t really pull it off.) I was specifically suggesting that Kanye has been so long and so far removed from the struggles of real life black people he no longer considers himself part of that larger community. As was common in the antebellum south — and really, everywhere the colonizers touched — creating artificial status distinctions between categories of slaves was an effective strategy for keeping the overall population in servitude. The house negro could be turned into a loyal lieutenant of the slaveholding regime, as he sought to protect his own status.

… You can see now how MAGA white people are eager to deploy Kanye against the rest of us. To put it more bluntly, Kanye’s a f**king tool.

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The Twitter bot of course did not recognize the powerful historical subtext in my totally devastating and cool tweet at a superstar who has roughly 18 gabillion more followers than I do. There’s some discussion among my colleagues about whether “Uncle Tom” got me suspended, or “Negro” got me suspended. But I think it was the combination that tripped the algorithm, and the fact that I sent it at someone Twitter has an interest in protecting. I have said both words on Twitter before, though I don’t think in the same tweet and certainly not “at” anybody.

But, it doesn’t really matter why the bot did it. Twitter placed me in time-out. The HNIC can go around telling black people that they deserved to be slaves, but I probably can’t type out “HNIC” without getting blocked again. Some world.

Some people noticed the irony of me getting suspended, given that I have been pretty out-front on the need for Twitter to more closely monitor and ban hate speech. One of the arguments from the First Amendment crowd (especially the ones wise enough to realize that you have no First Amendment rights to Twitter), is that giving tech companies the power to control speech is inherently dangerous because they will do it poorly. This is a pretty good example of their point: here I am a black man speaking out against the racism of Kanye West, and I’m the one who gets suspended.

But, don’t worry, I’m not one of those liberals who gets mugged and then suddenly starts voting for Republicans. The fact that Twitter suspended my account for 12 hours for entirely stupid reasons doesn’t shake my belief that Twitter should do a better job blocking people who threaten and harass other users. Key word, of course, is “better.” Twitter needs to invest time and money and human intellectual capacity into figuring out how to make its platform more decent. Twitter is bad, now. It should be better. Suspending me is a small indication of the former, but it does not mean that the latter is an unattainable goal.

If getting us from where we are to where we need to be means that I need to be, unjustly to my mind, put in Twitter jail for 12 hours here or there, so be it. I survived. The world turned just fine without my NBA playoff tweets for a night. Nothing is f**ked here, dude. Twitter just needs to keep trying to do better.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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