Content Warning first: Sexual violence is described herein.

So background: West's statement is transcribed and available in the video original here. I'm sorry to say that I struggle to find a coherent idea within it.

Let's talk about slavery and choice. An enslaved person has no freedom of choice. The state of being enslaved is one of being subject to the absolute control of another, with any choices one makes out of normal human capacity to reason and make decisions for oneself utterly negated at the enslaver's merest whim. To speak of slavery as something that must have been chosen by the enslaved in order to endure for four hundred years is absurd. Slavery did not persist by choice for four hundred years or four seconds, but rather was imposed and maintained by a regime of brutality, torture, rape, terror, and literally every horror imaginable to the enslavers.

No example can do this all justice, but here's one anyway. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, toured the South in the 1850s and observed slavery up close. Oldsted was out with an overseer on a slave labor camp when they came across an eighteen year old enslaved girl named Sall hiding in a gully. She was more than old enough to have duties assigned by her enslaver, from which she chose to absent herself from. That choice had to be negated. This is how it was done:

“That won’t do,” said he [the overseer], “get down on your knees.” The girl knelt on the ground; he got off his horse, and holding him with his left hand, struck her thirty or forty blows across the shoulders with his tough, flexible, “raw-hide” whip. They were well laid on, as a boatswain would thrash a skulking sailor, or as some people flog a baulking horse, but with no appearance of angry excitement on the part of the overseer. At every stroke the girl winced, and exclaimed, “Yes, sir!” or “Ah, sir!” or “Please, sir!” not groaning or screaming. At length he stopped and said, “Now tell me the truth.” The girl repeated the same story. “You have not got enough yet,” said he, “pull up your clothes-lie down.” The girl without any hesitation, without a word or look of remonstrance or entreaty, drew closely all her garments under her shoulders, and lay down upon the ground with her face toward the overseer, who continued to flog her with the rawhide, across her naked loins and thigh, with as much strength as before. She now shrunk away form him, not rising, but writhing, groveling, and screaming, “Oh, don’t, sir! oh, please stop, master! please, sir! please, sir! oh, that’s enough, master! oh, Lord! oh, master, master! oh, God, master, do stop! oh, God, master! oh, God, master!”

Sall was, I remind you, eighteen. Yet the man who managed her day to day enslavement had the power to make her strip naked and lay on the ground so he could whip her as hard as he could. Between her legs. She could only scream and beg mercy. Where's the choice? When she took off her clothes? Sall wasn't born yesterday; she knew if she didn't they would be torn off and she'd be whipped worse still and no one could stop it.

Being enslaved is knowing that you can be destroyed at an instant. For any reason, or for no reason at all, the enslaved can be subjected to unlimited torture. If not you, then your family might suffer the same fate. Sall was someone's daughter, someone's friend. She might have had siblings nearby to see. She had probably seen things like this done to her loved ones just as they would see it done to her, in public and in the bright light of day. This isn't a life that Sall or anyone else chose, but rather one she was born into by the people who had the power to do it all. The white enslavers had all the choices in the United States and made every one from setting up their laws and selecting their labor system down the chain to Sall's clothes coming off and the rawhide striking.

The overseer understood that full well. Olmsted asked if all of that was really necessary and he had the standard answer for men in his position:

Oh yes, sir,” (laughing again.) “If I hadn’t punished her so hard she would have done the same thing again to-morrow, and half the people on the plantation would have followed her example. Oh, you’ve no idea how lazy these n______ are; you northern people don’t know any thing about it. They’d never do any work at all if they were not afraid of being whipped.

I have omitted the slur; Olmsted did not.

To the enslaver, this is just business. Olmsted may as well have asked him if he had to put on clothes before going to work. We should be horrified, but don't let that distract from what he said: If he didn't punish Sall just as he did, then others would have chosen as she did, more and more often. Keeping slavery running required the whip, applied liberally and without remorse.

Glee was optional, but not necessarily rare. The enslaver at the Barrow plantation

penned suggestive diary notations such as “had a general Whiping frolick,” “whiped about half to day,” “general Whipping yesterday,” “intend Whipping them straight, “whiped all my grown cotten pickers today.”

There were at least six such "frolics" in a two year period, independent of the ordinary and frequent run of whippings. He also chose other punishments:

In his fine dissertation on the slave family, Bobby Jones concluded that Barrow resorted to “practically every known form of chastisement slaveholders used.” Jones pointed out: “During his career, Barrow resorted to chains; extra work; whipping; humiliation, such as making a man wear women’s clothing and parade around the quarters; imprisonment; stocks; ‘raked several negro heads to day’; ‘staking out’; ‘hand-sawing’; and dousing or ducking in water which occurred in October and November.”

Hand sawing involved beating someone with the saw, teeth first.

From the tremendous array of sources from enslaved people themselves, their enslavers giving advice to one another, and white third parties, we know such violence is the overwhelming norm. All the stories of whipping, cutting, chaining, beating, rape, and torture didn’t just come from nowhere. People, almost all white, did them all to other people, all black. They made a system of this, a great, all-encompassing world that turned blood, pain, and screams into the money that contributed to the wealth of one nation and fed the mills of another. The enslaved chose none of that; the enslavers did. Millions more whites chose to stand idly by and watch it all happen too, when not busy helping make it happen themselves. Only when the system's hard hand seem like it might soon reach them too did minds change.

Sources

The foundational work on slavery from a theoretical perspective, which goes into what kind of choice the enslaved might have -or rather its absolute lack- is Patterson's Slavery and Social Death. My quotes from Olmsted are from A Journey in the Back Country. The Barrow plantation is discussed in great detail in Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game, from which I have taken those quotes.