The Song 'New Slaves' By Kanye West

Post-colonial approach
The song ‘New Slaves’ starts out with Kanye West talking about what his mother has experienced growing up as an African-American. West’s “momma was raised in the era when clean water was only served to the fairer skin”. His mother, Donda West, was born in 1949 in Oklahoma . She was raised in Southern America, imprinted by obvious segregation that was legalized in 1896 by the Jim Crow law , and this affected something as ordinary as water fountains. Several riots occurred from 1950-1970, in the era where Donda West grew up. These riots and the vast focus on the segregation of the African-American population led to several Civil Rights Acts for the African-American community – segregation, therefore, became history.

“Meanwhile the DEA teamed up with the CCA, They tryna lock niggas up, they tryna make new slaves.”
The War on Drugs that started back in 1980 meant that U.S. prisons have experienced growth in imprisoners, especially of African-Americans, even though the white population is more likely to engage in the illegal drug industry. The consequence of this “increasing over-incarceration” of African-American men mean that 1 in 3 of them can expect to become imprisoned today. As Michelle Alexander writes, this can be interpreted as “The New Jim Crow” – racism is still an issue and African-Americans still experience exploitation and lack of freedom; just like the

AAVE has faced several prejudices, being stamped as an illogical form of language use and as bad English. As an African-American rapper, the use of AAVE is incredibly common, and Kanye West makes use of it in his texts, making it more dramatic/realistic . When looking at certain sentences in ‘New Slaves’, it is noticeable how AAVE is used. One grammatical feature that is used in the sentence “I know that we the new slaves” is the deletion of a copula , where the word ‘are’ is here left out after the pronoun ‘we.’ The Copula is, therefore, a linking