From KKK to Kanye: When pop culture does actual harm

A couple weeks ago I engaged in a nostalgic conversation with some co-workers about the classic 1973 James Bond film Live and Let Die.

I'm a diehard Bond film (with all the caveats that come along with it) and that Roger Moore film was probably the one that made me fall in love with the character as a child. I didn't pick up on the messy racial politics of the movie when I saw it as a kid. It was just escapist fun, and while I can now acknowledge that the film has plenty of dated, even offensive elements -- I still love it.

I understand that in the grand scheme of things this movie didn't contribute much that would be construed as constructive when it comes to our collective racial dialogue (although, it did break ground as the first, and for many years the only, 007 to feature an African-American leading lady). But with all that being said, it's caricatures aren't cruel and don't have tremendous staying power.

Clearly, if the film were re-made today it would need a serious overhaul, but I can appreciate it for it was, with a full understanding of the context in which it was made.

There are other films, however, that I can't excuse as being historically naive, because there clearly is an insidious, destructive intent behind them.

For instance, for me, Gone with the Wind and the 1915 KKK propaganda film The Birth of a Nation are unforgivable, regardless of their artistic merits, because both movies were hugely influential, shaping decades of American thought and codifying a kind of historical revisionism which led to real-world oppression and murder.

Gone with the Wind shamelessly romanticized the pre-Civil War south, casting slaveowners as benevolent victims. This 1939 film is the most financially successful film of all time if adjusted for inflation -- if you could afford to buy a ticket when this movie came out, you saw it. And what it's done and has continued to do is perpetuate the idea that the South was fighting for a noble, even righteous cause, and that they essentially got a raw deal from the North.

The Birth of a Nation was even more overtly destructive. It was a recruiting tool for the Klan, but also a polemic whose purpose was to completely eviscerate the Reconstruction era, which was the last sustained effort to afford black Americans equal rights in this country until the 1960s. Not only was the film a success, it was endorsed by the sitting president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, an avowed bigot. It helped swell the ranks of the Klan and ushered in the Jim Crow era.

We still see whitewashing and the romanticization of problematic figures and periods to this day. And the further we are removed from the historical facts, that more dangerous this kind of bright, shiny object-style of revisionism can be.

For instance, millions of people flocked to the P.T. Barnum biopic The Greatest Showman last year without the foggiest idea that the real life man was a vicious racist and abuser of animals. Of course no single work of art can cover every inch of ground. But it's simply wildly irresponsible to not even allude to or address a person's character flaws.

Which leads me to Kanye West.

Kanye West's descent into whatever decks exist below the Sunken Place of course hits harder because I have been such a longtime fan of his music, and less so a defender of him as a human being.

He began to lose me when he said women get abortions to extort wealthy men, when he claimed Bill Cosby was innocent and when he started selling concert garb with the Confederate flag emblazoned on it. Then, he declared his support for the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, a man who has defended white supremacists, endorsed police brutality and torture, and who spent years insisting that the first black president was not an American or smart enough to gain entry to an Ivy League school without any proof whatsoever.

Sure, a lot of people don't pay attention to what Kanye says and does, but unfortunately a lot of people do. And whether or not he is an unwitting stooge or a conniving performance artist has now become beside the point. He is actively being wielded as a racially polarizing cudgel by the likes of Donald Trump and now, unspeakably, Alex Jones.

There is no turning back from this. Right-wingers searching for a justification for not having to answer for the ills of slavery can now quote Kanye West. Conservatives looking to pin violence in black inner city neighborhoods on Barack Obama can now quote Kanye West. And they are.

This is not a benevolent, in-the-moment kind of cultural insensitivity that you might grimace and push past in an old film or TV show. We know better now, or at least we should, and if all of the social movements of recent years should have taught us anything, it's that if we don't know something, we ought to ask somebody.

The lack of true intellectual curiosity, the indulgence and placating that has greeted this recent gambit speaks volumes -- I guess -- of how highly his artistry is regarded, but also how permissive the moment we're currently living in is.

Kanye has suggested that part of the reason he "loves" Trump is that Trump made him feel like "he" could be president. Perhaps he has no idea how profound a tell that was. It's the same Joker-ish, "watch the world burn" philosophy -- or cynicism -- that has infected so many Americans.

It's this notion that nothing matters anymore and nothing is to be truly trusted. But then there's facts and the lives of everyday people, who don't have the luxury of believing whatever is convenient until the next news cycle.

We may not truly know just how regressive the past few days have been for black culture, or American culture, period. But I do know that I won't laugh about it later, not even a little bit.