Kanye West Disses Harriet Tubman...And Sistas COME FOR HIM!

Kanye West Disses Harriet Tubman...And Sistas COME FOR HIM!

When Toni Fulton and her sister jumped in the car Sunday for a roughly two-hour road trip through South Carolina to attend Kanye West’s first campaign event since the rapper declared he was running for president earlier this month, neither could predict what would await them at the venue in North Charleston. But the last thing the Fultons expected was to find themselves angrily marching out of the event after being there for only 20 minutes. The cause of their sudden exit? West declaring onstage that famed abolitionist Harriet Tubman, who has been called “the Moses of her people,” “never actually freed the slaves.” “She just had the slaves go work for other white people,” West said. Loud groans and unintelligible murmuring immediately erupted from the large crowd of several hundred people who had gathered at the Exquis Event Center. “Come on, man,” a voice shouted out. Meanwhile, the Fulton sisters, who are black, decided they had seen enough. In a now-viral video capturing West’s comment, Toni Fulton made her exasperation with the Grammy Award-winning artist clear in a single statement. “Yo, we leavin’ right now,” she could be heard saying in the background of the short clip as it abruptly cut off. “We’re young, black women and there weren’t a lot of us in the room,” Fulton, 30, told The Washington Post. “We know better than to be in a space that we’re not uplifted in. While he was saying a lot of crazy things that didn’t directly offend us, that was offensive and it wasn’t appropriate for us to be there anymore.” West, who is trying to get on the ballot in South Carolina, spoke for about an hour during Sunday’s freewheeling campaign rally, bouncing between a variety of subjects ranging from abortion and religion to international trade. But his claim about Tubman swiftly became the most-talked-about moment from the event. Video clips circulated widely online, prompting critics and historians to share facts about Tubman’s storied legacy and urge West, who faced intense backlash in 2018 for saying 400 years of African American enslavement sounded “like a choice,” to educate himself. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/20/kanye-harriet-tubman/

Oshay Duke Jackson