CNN spent several minutes Wednesday explaining to views why rapper Kanye West was wrong when he said slavery “sounds like a choice.”
West’s comment prompted a TMZ staffer, Van Lathan, to confront West and argue that he was showing an “absence of thought.”
CNN host Alisyn Camerota agreed with that assessment in a discussion with Chris Cuomo Wednesday morning.
“He is not showing intellectual curiosity,” Camerota said. “He has a feeling, right? This is where we are right now. I mean, I just see it everywhere, and obviously we see it in the president.”
Kanye West said slavery sounds like “a choice” yesterday and has been getting blowback for it. Alisyn Camerota and @ChrisCuomo break it all down for you. https://t.co/O7pCpdDmvF pic.twitter.com/t3H8r1CaaJ
— New Day (@NewDay) May 2, 2018
“He has a feeling that it must have somehow been a choice, so he runs with his feeling,” she added. “He is not doing the research, he is not checking his feeling against facts.”
Cuomo added Wednesday that West seems to be trying to get attention.
“This is what the guy does,” he said. “But you have to believe that there’s a price to that, and he should have to pay it, and he’s paying it right now.”
Both hosts added that their children know more about slavery than rapper West on the issue of whether slavery was a choice.
“My eight-year-old knows that slavery wasn’t a choice,” Cuomo said. “And by the way, she doesn’t have to live with the culture and the culture and the stigma and the pain that African Americans do.”
“For sure, and listen, my 13-year-olds now know this also because they go to school and they study it,” Camerota added. “But Kanye is so far from that.”
CNN has had lots to say about the rapper’s views on slavery. Tuesday night, CNN host Don Lemon said slaves had no choice and were brought to America in “real chains.”
