From ‘the Man with the Golden Smile’ to Yeezus: How Ego & Unapologeticness Fuelled the Racially Conscious Careers of Jack Johnson and Kanye West

“He was scandal, he was gossip, he was a public menace for many, a public hero for some, admired and demonized, feared, misunderstood, and ridiculed.” These are the words used by Dr. Gerald Early to describe Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, in his PBS article, “Rebel of the Progressive Era”, written to complement the release of Ken Burns’s 2004 documentary on Jack Johnson, Unforgivable Blackness. Now, before I provide you with more context, take a moment to consider the following quote, as well: “When you’re the absolute best, you get hated on the most.” This quote, spoken by Kanye West to students at prestigious fashion school Los Angeles Trade Technical College, and in which Yeezy is referring to himself, in my opinion, is a modern-day, hip-hop tinged response to the one that precedes it. The careers of Jack Johnson and Kanye West parallel each other in generationally nuanced ways — through their egos, their cultural impact and essentiality, their racial intentionality, and, at times, their delusions of grandeur.

Kanye West transformed, over the course of his career, from a pink polo-donning, “crack music”-toting, “don’t care what people say” attitude-bearing, protogeic rapper/producer to a god-proclaiming, ego-tripping, Kardashian-wifing, controversy-instigating legend — a feat accomplished thanks to the man himself, cultural mass media, the crippling oppressions inflicted upon black men in this country, and iconic predecessors like Jack Johnson. Johnson, himself, experienced an ego and controversy-filled metamorphosis throughout the span of his career, prompted by similar societal factors.

The two, whose careers exist almost a full century apart, acted with race as a focal point in each of their careers and did so with unrelenting and unapologetic purposefulness; a purposefulness which Johnson chose to exhibit through his sex life, during which he openly had sexual affairs with white women and white women only. He wore his race on his chest the whole time and, as Dr. Early states, “did not seem to care what whites thought of him, and this bothered most whites a great deal. He was not humble or diffident with whites. He gloated about his victories and often taunted his opponents in the ring,” nor, Early adds, did he, “care what blacks thought of him, as some were critical of his sex life. His preference for white women seemed an embarrassment and something that would bring the wrath of whites down on the heads of every black person.” Where does the Yeezy comparison lie, you ask? Well, this controversial re-appropriation of whiteness as a bombastic tool to make aggressively apparent the racial tensions in America is a strategy adopted by the cunning and controversial Mr. West as well. Not only is he currently married to Kim Kardashian, one of America’s most commercially influential white women, but he engraved in American pop culture history the date of the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, the day Yeezus himself, interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video, to proclaim that Beyoncé had “one of the best videos of all time”, thus implying that Beyoncé is the rightful recipient. This moment in music history marks the day Kanye West, arguably, as he so sweetly puts it in his track off of 2016’s The Life of Pablo, “made that b*tch famous” (referring to Taylor Swift), and made himself one of the most hated men in America. But hey, when you’re the absolute best, you get hated on the most, right?

Many would and have argued that Kanye West’s behavior at this time was toxic, damaging, and even delusional. I mean, this is also a time during which he was bugging out on “Sway in the Morning” about how Sway “[DOESN’T] HAVE THE ANSWERS!” and selling Confederate flag-themed apparel, so that’s not a completely illogical conclusion. The same can go for those who see Jack Johnson’s eccentric, confrontational, and, at times, seemingly stereotype-embracing behavior as delusional. However, context matters. Jack Johnson was not bereft of intent in his unconventional methods. As The Howard Journal of Communication journal, “Reexamining Jack Johnson, Stereotypes, and America’s White Press, 1908–1915”, states: “White America could not merely ignore Johnson simply too many social and economic interests were tied to the symbolic significance of his title.” He was so controversial that the people who hated him most couldn’t ignore him; and that’s what brought attention to the injustices inflicted upon him as a black man. Same goes for Kanye, whose intention behind the confederate flag apparel was to exhibit his ability to reclaim it and strip it of its racist, white supremacist symbolism; and whose reason behind his “Sway in the Morning” meltdown was his frustration with fashion industry racism.

Was this delusion? Did they go so far to prove their equality, if not superiority, to white men that they lost themselves in translation? Courtney Goodridge’s journal on the psychological complexities of Kanye’s behavior proposes that he exhibits “grandiose ‘overt’ narcissism, [for which] boosted self-esteem and maladaptive arrogance are the most common symptoms”; and perhaps this is a complex which can be applied to Johnson as well. I, personally, believe that each of their boosted egos, although sometimes to the detriment of their public image, provide them with the very spice, vigor, and unapologeticness necessary to truly make change.