Enough, Dawg.

Robert Lashley
3 min readNov 3, 2022

I am from a generation of black folks infuriated by toxic internet politics. Kanye West and Kyrie Irving are the final straw after years of bullshit.

I come from a place people call Up South. My spiritual and actual roots are from black people who came up from the south to serve in WWII. My grandfather did the books for the 6th at Ft Lewis to make sure they had enough food and clothing. Stirred by black media, my Uncle Moe went with my grandmother’s second husband to the eastern theater and witnessed him losing his life in France. My grandmother and aunts served in the Laundry Room in Ft Lewis. Later, they would serve in civil service and union politics with one intent and purpose, to make black people’s lives a little better than they were yesterday.

These people, along with my mother, gave me every good thing about my core. In their deeds works and love, they gave me my history, ethic, and strategic matter of functioning. They did all this because for the hope that future generations and myself wouldn’t have to go through what they went through in the Jim Crow south. They gave me my history, ethic, and strategic matter of functioning because they wanted me to deal with an agonizing world the best way I know how.

I’m sure my grandparents, aunts uncles who raised me would be heartbreaking and horrified by what this country has become. They would have also been heartbroken and horrified by how many internet black folks don’t want freedom as much as they want the chain key and big house( and want to repopularize civilization’s most disgusting fables around a vulnerable population in their reveries for a lock).

I’ve been talking about Kanye for about 20 years, 15 longer than I ever wanted to. And the “ poor genius Kanye” people are weeping over? All the people having personal recriminations about whether he should be canceled for offending subgroups can go fuck themselves because they weren’t done with him when he wanted Alexis dead in 808 and heartbreak in 2008. Or when he talked about killing Taylor in My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2012. Or when he talked about forcibly fisting a woman with the black power in Yeezus. Or when he proclaimed Bill Cosby and R Kelly innocent in 2016. Is all this worth the music of a canny influencer who had all his best work ghostwritten? ( Rhymefest, Big Sean, Cy Hi )

And what a horribly apt symbol for the rancid class myopia of internet social justice right now than Kyrie’s irving’s tearfully defiant anti-Semitism a week before…

Robert Lashley

Writer. Author. Former Jack Straw and Artist Trust Fellow. The baddest ghetto nerd on the planet.