Wishful thinking may have had us all believing that Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) horrific Saturday night, Oct. 8 tweet – I’m going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” – would be met with widespread outrage and then would soon die down. Wrong on both counts, which is why we find ourselves in the current predicament: anti-Semites and hatemongers have ventured out of their dark places, and we are all the worse for it.
Looking back, maybe we were naïve. Remember, first of all, that Ye has twice as many followers on Twitter (32 million) than there are Jews in the world (just under 15 million). CAUTIONARY NOTE: It is important to be crystal clear because words really do matter. This is not to suggest in any way that Ye’s followers all are anti-Semitic or share his warped, sick and very dangerous view of the world.
But hate speech has the unfortunate power of emboldening the haters. Soon came the banners over Los Angeles’s busy 405 Freeway and, this past weekend, in perfect timing with the annual Florida-Georgia college football game in Jacksonville, more banners on local highways and the projection of a Ye-related hate message on the exterior of TIAA Bank Field, where 76,000 people had just attended the annual game.
The hate genie is once again out of the bottle, and it will be next to impossible to get it back in. Let us not be naïve on this: This is bad – very bad – and it once again gives a voice to those around us who use or support hate speech or, perhaps just as bad, do not vocally and vociferously reject it whenever it rears its very ugly head.
So let’s not wait until the next time (and, sadly, there will be a next time). Let us all categorically reject hate speech in any form. And let’s send that message as loudly and clearly as possible. Our future is depending upon it.