Professor Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the first of six lectures, titled ‘Philosophic Prelude’. In this first lecture, Prof. West asks: How do we emerge from the bleakness of our catastrophic times?

Professor Cornel West - Lecture One: Philosophic Prelude

The University of Edinburgh

May 14, 2024 

THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 

[NOTE:   Dr. West's remarks begins @9:00]

VIDEO:  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAXjezpNKIU

Professor Cornel West delivers the 2024 Gifford Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh, titled ‘A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane’. This is the first of six lectures, titled ‘Philosophic Prelude’. In this first lecture, Prof. West asks: How do we emerge from the bleakness of our catastrophic times? He summarises: ‘In seeking a way forward, I will proceed on three philosophic levels – the genealogical, existential and pedagogical. The genealogical, or historical, level of my analysis will set the stage, and my period will be broadly the Age of Europe (1492-1945) and Age of America (1945-2024). The existential level of my analysis will embrace the lived experiences of struggling, suffering creatures. The pedagogical level will be classical in character and musical in content. My overall theme will resonate with the three pillars of jazz – blues (tragicomic catastrophe lyrically expressed), swing (myopic time opened to new possibilities) and improvisation (practical wisdom and timely interventions unleashed).’

Prof. West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice, Union Theological Seminary, New York. His teaching and publications focus on roles of race, gender, and class struggle in American society, synthesizing influences from Christianity, the Black Church, democratic socialism, left-wing populism, neopragmatism and transcendentalism. A musician and spoken word artist, Prof. West has collaborated with acts across the rap, hip-hop and funk genres, as well as appearing in the Matrix series and many documentary films. The prestigious Gifford Lectureships, held at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and St Andrews, have been delivered annually since 1888 by a succession of distinguished international scholars. The Lectureships were established by Adam Lord Gifford (1820-1887) to ‘promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term – in other words, the knowledge of God’, and have enabled a most notable field of scholars to contribute to the advancement of theological thought. 

Find out more about the Gifford Lectures: https://www.ed.ac.uk/arts-humanities-... 

Gifford Lectures blog: https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/gifford-lectures/ Please note that the captions have been automatically generated.

Briahna Joy Gray and Dr. Cornel West On Israel-Palestine Violence and the Leftist Response + Marc Lamont Hill Speaks On Israel-Hamas War, International Law, History + More

The Left's Response to Israel/Palestine Violence (w/ Cornel West)

Bad Faith 

Premiered October 12, 2023  

Dr. West rejoins Bad Faith to talk about his choice to leave the Green Party, and whether it’s really the best strategic option. He then weighs in on the violence on Israel/Palestine and the controversies around the left’s response. What does he make of the Harvard student groups joint letter in response to Hamas’s attack? How does one acknowledge grief and compassion at the murder of Israeli civilians, without validating media narratives that exclusively value Israeli lives without acknowledging the ongoing occupation of Palestinians? It’s the kind of tough, empathic, important conversation we’ve come to expect from Dr. West. 

Subscribe to Bad Faith on YouTube to access our full video library. Find Bad Faith with Briahna Joy Gray on Twitter (@badfaithpod) and Instagram (@badfaithpod). Theme by Nick Thorburn (@nickfromislands)

 

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS:

 

Briahna Joy Gray (b. August 15, 1985) is an American political commentator, lawyer, and political consultant who served as the National Press Secretary for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. Gray is a contributing editor for Current Affairs, and was a senior politics editor for The Intercept. She hosts her own podcast, Bad Faith, and co-hosts The Hill's web series Rising. Ms. Gray is a graduate of both Harvard University and Harvard Law School

 

Dr. Cornel West (b. June 2, 1953) is currently the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary and is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. A democratic socialist, two of Dr. West's most influential books are Race Matters (1993) and Democracy Matters (2004). He has written 20 books and has edited 13 and is widely recognized as one of the major, most important, and highly influential public intellectuals, scholars, critics, and activists in the world today. 

Marc Lamont Hill Speaks On Israel-Hamas War, International Law, History + More

 

Breakfast Club Power 105.1 FM

 

October 17, 2023 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Marc Lamont Hill (b. December 17, 1978) is an American academic, author, activist, and television personality. He is a professor of urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. Hill is the host of UpFront on Al Jazeera English, VH1 Live! on VH1, and Basketball Wives reunion shows. He is also a BET News correspondent. He is the author or co-author of four books: the award-winning Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity; The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black life in America; the New York Times bestseller Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on The Vulnerable from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond; and Gentrifier. He has also published two edited books: Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility; and Schooling Hip-Hop: New Directions in Hip-Hop Based Education.

Trained as an anthropologist of education, Dr. Hill holds a Ph.D. (with distinction) from the University of Pennsylvania. He finished his undergraduate studies at Temple University, where he received his B.S. in education and Spanish in 2000. He later earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the intersections between culture, politics, and education in the United States and the Middle East.

Dr. Cornel West Calls Out the Obama Administration and its Black Political Acolytes At the 50th Anniversary of the March On Washington

DR. CORNEL WEST

http://www.popularresistance.org/cornel-west-march-organizers-are-part-of-the-obama-plantation/
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnz4_LuFqgk
 

Cornel West: March Organizers Are Part of the “Obama Plantation”

Cornel West: Washington March Organizers are Part of the “Obama Plantation”; Says Sharpton Attempts to “Contain Black Rage”, Jay-Z an Example of the “Re-Niggerization of the Black Professional Class.”

Bruce Dixon’s Open Letter to Melissa Harris-Perry, Toure, Joy Ann Reid:  Stop the Hate, Grow Some Guts

Glen Ford: US Military Conquest of Africa “All But Complete”

Through AFRICOM and massive amounts of military aid and training, the US literally owns every army on the African continent, except those of Eritrea and Zimbabwe. Glen Ford explains….

Rev. Al Sharpton and other organizers of the March on Washington 50th anniversary commemoration are so tightly tied to “the Obama plantation,” said activist and academic Dr. Cornel West, “we won’t get to focus on the New Jim Crow; we won’t get to focus on the privatization of education; we won’t get to focus on the land grabs and the gentrification of land it the city; we won’t get to focus on working class people; and we certainly won’t get to focus on the drones and those bombs landing on innocent brothers and sisters in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, and especially the 222 innocent children who have been murdered by the U.S. government so far, and counting.”

President Obama is scheduled to speak at the August 28 event at the Lincoln Memorial. Dr. West, of the Union Theological Seminary, in New York City, does not plan to attend. “If Martin [Luther King Jr.] were to show up at this march and they asked him to give a speech,” said West, “what he would say would be so subversive that those on the Obama plantation would be revealed for who they are, which is obsessed with career, obsessed with access, obsessed with status as opposed to being obsessed with the suffering of poor Black brothers and sisters.”

Speaking on Black Agenda Television, Dr. West said George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin has fueled “an overwhelming Black rage, and Brother Sharpton and the others are trying to contain it, and of course Obama and Holder are fearful of it, because Black rage is always the catalyst to Black self-determination, toward Black self-respect, and toward Black self-defense.”

Dr. West rebuked entertainment mogul Jay-Z, who said his “presence is charity” to Black people, “just like Obama’s is.”

“It’s what I call the re-niggerization of the Black professional class, where you have fear, you have a tremendous sense of being intimidated even though you have big money,” said West. “So you say to Brother Jay-Z, What are you risking? We don’t want to just see you successful, we appreciate it, we want to see you faithful to something bigger than you, and faith has to do with risking something. The only way you become de-niggerized and free is when you are willing to risk, when you’re willing to go against the grain, to show you’re not fearful, you’re not afraid. Unfortunately, Jay-Z at his worst is an example of folk who get so elevated that they don’t show courage and take a risk for something that is bigger than them.”

When the White House gets upset, Black MSNBC talking heads get apoplectic. MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, Toure and Joy Ann Reid whipped themselves into McCarthyite fervor against secrets-leaker Edward Snowden. Harris-Perry and Reid lost all sense of decorum, screaming like banshees at Wikileaks spokesman Kris Hrafnsson. In an open letter to the trio, Black Agenda Report managing editor Bruce Dixon described Harris-Perry and Reid as playing “a reprehensible game of make believe, where leakers are criminals instead of heroes, Wikileaks is a conspiracy instead of a media organization, Joy Ann’s a tough district attorney and Melissa’s a special agent ready with the handcuffs.” As for Toure’s reflexive defense of Obama’s global dragnet for Snowden: “We all know you’re just repeating what the White House the Pentagon the intelligence agencies tell you. That’s just plain lazy, man,” said Dixon, in his latest Black Agenda Television commentary. “Until the three of you grow the guts and integrity to represent something besides your own shallow careers on the tube, stop the fronting, stop the hate, and leave the real journalists alone.”

Once Again Cornel West Takes the President To Task--This Time in the Name of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.html?_r=1&hp

All,

Cornel West really goes after President Obama in a stinging Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. OUCH!! This reminds me of 2002 when Cornel threw a rhetorical thunderbolt at Lawrence Summers (former Clinton Treasury Secretary, current Harvard economics professor, former Harvard President and former chief economic advisor to President Obama--as well as longtime groveling political stooge for Wall Street). West called Summers the "Ariel Sharon of American higher education" (great line!) when Summers was Harvard's president and Cornel was still a professor there and Summers tried to publicly embarrass Cornel among his colleagues and students. The result: Cornel left Harvard enraged and insulted and returned to Princeton even after Summers verbally relented and begged and pleaded for West to stay...But ultimately that little contretemps was a mere academic skirmish of no truly significant or lasting consequence. And admittedly a mere editorial by itself like this one is hardly the revolution. However for real political drama and public intellectual chatter/gossip you gotta admit this is MUCH better...LOL...

Kofi


August 25, 2011

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave
By CORNEL WEST
Princeton, N.J.

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

Black Agenda Report Editor Glen Ford Weighs in On Cornel West's Critique of President Obama and Its Political Implications for the United States

Dr. Cornel West

http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/how-cornel-west-did-obamites-favor


Black Agenda Report

News, analysis and commentary from the black left

How Cornel West Did the Obamites a Favor
by Glen Ford
May 25, 2011
Black Agenda Report

Unable to defend the indefensible, Black Obama supporters have been “rendered all but mute on issues of policy.” They got their chance to reenter the political conversation when Princeton professor and media celebrity Cornel West, a former Obama supporter who is now a harsh critic, speculated on the racial workings of the president’s brain. That was a mistake. “There is no need to inject racial psychoanalysis into the (public) conversation when straightforward political analysis is more than sufficient to the task.”

How Cornel West Did the Obamites a Favor
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

“Cornel West’s foray into Obamanalysis gave them the opportunity to explode in reams of outraged words that had little or nothing to do with policy.”

It is a shame that Princeton professor Cornel West did not stick to a disciplined critique of the corporatist policies that have made Barack Obama richly deserving of the label, a “Black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” Instead, West slipped into psycho-babble, musing on the president’s supposed “fear of free Black men” and associated personality deformities. The particularities of Obama’s racial background may, or may not, have contributed to his malignant neglect of the African American condition, but we will not forge a movement to defeat Obama and his Wall Street masters by putting the president on the couch.

There is no need to inject racial psychoanalysis into the (public) conversation when straightforward political analysis is more than sufficient to the task. In two and a half years, the Obama administration has expanded George Bush’s wars and national security infrastructure and budget, added a new theater of combat in North Africa, and proclaimed a presidential prerogative to assassinate and invade at will. He has out-Bushed Bush.

Obama engineered by far the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, funneling at least $12 trillion to Wall Street. At the height of his popularity, still riding the crests of post-election euphoria, and under no real pressure from a demoralized Republican Party, Obama eagerly placed Social Security and other entitlements “on the table” for chopping. He endorsed the corporate/Republican line that deficits were the nation’s biggest problem, effectively sentencing the unemployed to damnation and inviting the austerity reign of terror that has descended. And these are just the highlights of Obama’s tenure.

“The rationale for continued Black and progressive support of the Obama administration has been reduced to one factor: a primal fear of the Tea Party boogeyman.”

The resulting catastrophe in Black America had rendered Black Obamites all but mute on issues of policy; they could not defend the indefensible. In an MSNBC debate with West, Al Sharpton, the administration’s Black pit bull, was reduced to inane sputtering. The rationale for continued Black and progressive support of the Obama administration has been reduced to one factor: a primal fear of the Tea Party boogeyman. Yet, the sheer economic and political devastation wrought under Obama’s brief tenure has made it plausible to make the case – as we do at Black Agenda Report – that the First Black President is not the lesser of two evils, but the more effective evil, having facilitated more of the right-wing agenda at home and abroad than George Bush ever attempted or envisioned. What does it matter that Obama is not a white Republican, if he can tear down the social safety net, privatize education and wage aggressive war more effectively than the GOP?

Of course, Obama is empowered to act as Wall Street’s Trojan Horse by the acquiescence of the Left’s core constituencies – chiefly, Black America, without whose consent and active participation progressive politics is reduced to the fringes. For reasons that have everything to do with race, Black people have clung to Obama even as he has consistently pushed them away. But the agonzing facts of a community in historical free-fall can no longer be denied. The “Black Wall” that the African American mis-leadership class attempts to erect around Obama is cracking, if not crumbling, especially among left activists and intellectuals. Cornel West is a celebrity example.

“The First Black President is not the lesser of two evils, but the more effective evil, having facilitated more of the right-wing agenda at home and abroad than George Bush ever attempted or envisioned.”

Unable to mount a coherent defense of Obama’s policy decisions, especially after his further, dramatic lurch to the right following last year’s midterm elections, Obama’s unrepentant Black politicos seethed in relative silence. It had become impossible to speak in policy terms without indicting the presidential icon. Cornel West’s foray into Obamanalysis gave them the opportunity to explode in reams of outraged words that had little or nothing to do with policy. Prof. Melissa Harris-Perry managed to write almost 1,500 words for The Nation on West’s “personal attack” on Obama, offering only 130 words about her own position on Obama’s tenure at the end of the piece. TheRoot.com, a Black Obamite corporate hangout, gleefully reported that West had “’stepped in it’ with his controversial comments about President Obama,” with “Google News listing more than 100 stories.”

This is the kind of “controversy” in which Obamites revel, precisely because it allows them to avoid confrontation with Obama’s indefensible policies. If they can resurrect another version of the phony, diversionary arguments of 2007 and 2008 about whether Obama is “Black enough” to deserve African American support, then they can hope to coast through the 2012 campaign without having to justify support for the “Black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.”

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.


Cornel West speaking on "Left of Black, Episode 35"--Duke University--May 23, 2011

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcTf7QrRGhE&feature=player_embedded#at=35

http://youtu.be/qcTf7QrRGhE

What's Really Required of Progressive African American Leadership in a Time of Global Crisis

Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou

http://forusa.org/blogs/osagyefo-uhuru-sekou/cornel-west-crisis-black-leadership/8743

All,

An excellent piece and right on target. This is what is known as a clear-minded, mature, and politically sophisticated critical analysis of what the real issues are in this entire very important public debate, and why only a genuine critique informed by a disciplined commitment to alternative ideas-- and most importantly an organized grassroots and mass-based social movement-- can seriously address and resolve the problems that we all face on a national level--no matter who the President is at any given time...

Kofi


Cornel West and the Crisis in Black Leadership
By Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou
23 May 2011
Fellowship of Reconciliation

The recent controversy ignited by Cornel West’s critique of President Barack Obama and subsequent critiques of Dr. West reveal a fundamental crisis in black leadership. Traditionally, African-American intellectuals and activists have encountered the office of the president as outsiders with a nuanced understanding and repertoire of tactics including electoral brokerage, inside strategy, and social protest (organized and rhetorical).

These tactics have been executed against “The White Man.” The oppositional politic was the normative means of encountering the office of the presidency and the deployment of fierce rhetoric was an accepted means of public engagement. Both the candidacy and presidency of Barack Obama are a disruption of that rhetorical and tactical tradition. The African-American tradition of speaking truth to power has been complicated because that power is now embodied by “A Black Man.”

This is a unique moment in American democracy. The white supremacist gaze in the United States demonized black bodies, subjected their intelligence, and interrogated their national allegiance. Barack Obama’s winning campaign called into question these deep-seated notions that shaped U.S. public policy and perceptions.

Hence, the Obama presidency is an electoral and existential victory. The way in which African-American people make meaning for themselves inside the American empire has been recast. There is a widely-accepted narrative about Obama’s election. While it is true that his presence in the White House is because of his intelligence, effective fundraising apparatus, and sophisticated campaign machinery, the red carpets at the inaugural balls were soaked in the blood of martyrs.

The presidency of Barack Obama is a by-product of African Americans’ 400 years of struggle for access to the democratic project called America. The president has often located himself in that tradition and trajectory. He has strategically trafficked in the prophetic rhetoric of the civil rights movement and employed the homiletical rhythms of the Black Church. He has conveniently used these cultural signifiers in a way that is titillating to the national consciousness—linguistically embodying black folks’ quest for a more democratic society.

Moreover, black folks take great pride in the presence of three generations of African Americans in the White House. The real image of a beautiful black family beaming into the homes of all Americans has a deep impact on the psyche of the nation, and a denigrated people. There is a collective desire on the part of black America to protect and shield their existential idol-President Barack Hussein Obama. This is a new space in U.S. history—racial and collective national memory. The right-wing backlash, contemptible treatment, and flat-out disrespect consistently directed at the President and First Lady only serve to reinforce this protective existential and racial logic.

However, there is a counterpoint to this protectionist logic. Based on the criterion set forth by the African-American freedom struggle, there is an expectation beyond physical and psychic symbolism. Behind the ad hominem attacks, personal slights, and blogosphere punditry, what is at stake in West’s complaint is this prophetic expectation—there must be public policy to reflect the very tradition that the president uses and benefited from in his rise to power. Is it inappropriate to have this expectation of the President Barack Obama? Is it appropriate for black folks to levy a critique and action against a black man in the White House? Or must black leadership focus on defending the president from racist attacks?

The protectionist logic combined with the ultra-conservative Republican Party has circumscribed the political vision of the vast majority of African Americans. The logic goes that criticism of the president is tantamount to supporting ultra-conservative politics. Regardless of his legislative record, African Americans will vote for him in record numbers. This electoral allegiance is not a negotiating tool, but, rather, an existential duty. The protectionists cheapen any critical conversation about the president’s agenda. The only legitimate engagement is an insider strategy—access to the White House and supporting the administration’s agenda at all cost. Accordingly, organized and rhetorical protests are, vehemently, dismissed. In this formulation, the aforementioned questions and West’s lamentation remain unanswered.

The improvised electoral options guarantee that the president will not have to provide any substantive policy response to underemployment, unemployment, foreclosures, affordable healthcare, quality public education, expanding prison-industrial complex, and affordable housing—all of which affect African Americans, disproportionately. This makes him no different than any other president. Hence, he should be treated as such.

Every president since Abraham Lincoln has had to contend with an organized and rhetorical protest—the prophetic tradition. This tradition has always focused on the nation’s treatment of the most vulnerable citizens—the least of these. Under the prophetic gaze, politicians have either been celebrated or rebuked. Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists supported the Underground Railroad and offered stern public rebukes of Abraham Lincoln for not ending slavery. A. Philip Randolph and the broader labor movement marched and chastised Franklin D. Roosevelt until the creation of the New Deal. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movement pressured and protested the Kennedy and Johnson administration into the passage of civil rights and the Great Society legislation.

King once remarked that electoral politics are thermometers—measuring political climate; social protests and movements are thermostats—setting political climate. Organized and rhetorical protests have set the climate for an effective insider strategy and subsequent electoral allegiance in the voting booth. Prophetic rhetoric and organized rage have created the context for the passage of public policy that improves the quality of life for the least of these. The contemporary political climate is such that there are very limited possibilities for progressive social policies to emerge from the administration, itself. A recalcitrant Congress, a right-of-center Democratic Party, and two decades of neoliberal policies require that the president serve a right-of-center agenda which has been at odds with the prophetic tradition and the needs of the most vulnerable.

Hence, African-American leadership can not go it alone. The challenges facing democracy are nothing less that the retraction of the promise of the civil rights movement, dismantling of the Great Society, and reversal of the New Deal—let alone an ever-expanding prison- and military-industrial complex. Cornel West’s critique is part and parcel of a grand tradition of fiery prophetic rhetoric that must be connected to social movements. In order to shift the political discourse and create the conditions for progressive policy, a new multi-racial and multi-issue coalition has to emerge. Rhetorical protest must be matched with mass organizing.

Rev. Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou is a Freeman Fellow of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR-USA). This article was originally published on May 20, 2011 on “the feministwire” and is being cross-posted in various ally communities for wider distribution.

Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou's blog:

http://forusa.org/blog/osagyefo-uhuru-sekou

http://theafricanamericanclarioncall.com/?p=3213

All,

Here is still more CLARITY and DEPTH in this very important national debate...

Kofi

Dr. Cornel West

WEST VS. OBAMA
by Greg L
May 19, 2011
The African American Clarion Call

I’ve been on a bit of hiatus from my blog, in part due to work and in part to just taking a bit of a break. I rarely run out of things to say, but sometimes one has to do more listening and reading than “saying” and I find that’s good to do exclusively on occasion to gain some perspective.

It looks like we’ve got a fight brewing between the president and Princeton professor Cornell West over Obama’s credentials as a black man and West taking personal affront to being not respected. This really isn’t new as West has been having issues with Obama since shortly after his inauguration. In my view, some of the heat Obama is taking from West is to be dismissed while he has legitimate points on others.

First, let’s deal with that which should be dismissed. West asserts that Obama’s background is such that he’s more comfortable dealing with elite whites than he is dealing with “free black men”. Presumably, West counts himself among those who are free black men. I think it would be impossible for Obama to have become president with the support among the elite if he wasn’t comfortable moving in those circles. The converse is also true; that’s to say that there must also be a comfort level with him felt by the elite players. Based on our existing political structure in this country, pretty much anyone who ascends to the presidency has to meet that particular criteria and that’s the primary reason why many of the people who’ve been in that office are a product of the nation’s elite educational institutions and organizations. I’d imagine that West himself would have had to meet similar criteria in his experiences at Harvard and Princeton. So this criticism is pretty much a cheap shot way of calling Obama an Uncle Tom and I really think it can and should be dismissed as such.

But once one gets past that, there is a substantive critique of Obama’s foreign and domestic policies, particularly those domestic policies revolving around the financial crisis. On the latter, West suggests that Obama is “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of the corporate plutocrats.” Again, the reference to Obama being a black mascot clouds the issue and smacks of calling him an Uncle Tom, so I reject that part of the statement, but I find myself in agreement with the concept that Obama is very much a captive of the oligarchs. Rather than using this crisis to pursue much needed reforms, punishment of those who caused the problems and actually break the hold they have on the economy, Obama and his economic team have instead pursued accommodative policies that delay the inevitable day of reckoning. Rather than bringing the change on this front that everyone hoped for, we gotten a milquetoast response to a true crisis that really hasn’t ended. It’s only been ameliorated by delaying the day of reckoning.

On the foreign policy front, we’ve largely seen a continuation and expansion of the Bush policies. The war front has been expanded in Afghanistan, Libya and Pakistan and the sorts of things that have always gone on in pursuit of Pax Americana abroad continue unabated. Drone attacks have been expanded, Guantanamo remains open, domestic spying continues unabated and you can’t travel without getting groped and felt on. He continues the Bush policy of “exporting” democracy in the middle east as a tool for regime change while standing down on regime change for the tyrants that happen to be our “friends”. On the so called war on terror, the doctrines of Obama and Bush are virtually indistinguishable. That’s certainly not the change that many voted for and West’s critique here is spot on.

What we have here is a right wing democrat and rather than promoting change, Obama is more concerned with continuing the status quo. To be honest, I don’t think that he could have done anything else as that’s the nature of our political system. The system has swung towards fascism and political behavior across the board has been shaped towards that end. As that idea dawns on more people, there will be a backlash. You can’t sell everyone change and then bring none of it. That’s not to suggest that any of this would have been easy, so the fact that he hasn’t brought substantive change is really not the issue. The issue revolves around the failure to fight for it and to represent the interests of the people. West’s indictment against Obama here as well is spot on.

Personally, what I look for in a leader is the ability to speak the unvarnished truth, regardless of how controversial and painful it may be. This is what the country urgently needs and truth is the only premise upon which a true solution can be formulated. One can’t just hold his finger to the wind and do the political calculus as a condition of telling it. One has to have the courage to tell it, no matter the outcome or the controversy that may attend it and not cower in fear because of what Fox News is going to say. The Shirley Sherrod affair was instructive on Obama’s fears and lack of backbone.

For a fleeting moment, many believed that change was possible. It’s becoming clear that Obama sold what he has never attempted to deliver. It will be very hard for the next fresh face who comes along promising the sky to be believed as this is the last hurrah for hope and change.

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Cornel West on the Struggle for Democracy and Justice in the United States and What It Means in the 21st Century

Dr. Cornel West provides illumination on the state of the nation in the intellectual sanctuary of his Princeton office (Photo: Max Eternity)

Man of Mystery: LEGENDS - Cornel West from the Man of Mystery series (Limited-edition digital print by Max Eternity)

In the following five video clips:

West explains what it means to be a "funkmaster," while also commenting on America as a "death-dodging, death-ducking, death-denying culture."

West makes a comparative analysis of the respective legacies of MLK and Malcolm X.

West talks about the two forms of a new Jim Crow offered by the Democratic and Republican parties, also speaking to the "gangster-like" activities of President Obama's big-banking allies on Wall Street. West shares his understanding of casino capitalism and what he calls "turbo-capitalism." West also explains why President Obama is unlike FDR.

West says the left in America has been pushed out to the wilderness - the "poor people demonized, poverty criminalized, trade unions scapegoated," while at the same time we saw "prophetic churches, mosques and synagogues marginalized." West comments on President Obama's choice to prop up Wall Street by placing the very people who destroyed the US economy - Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, et al. - on his economic team.

West talks about President Obama's unwillingness to make mention of poor people in his 2011 State of the Union Address and asserts that Obama's economic team has no care or concern for the poor.

Dr. Cornel West: Greetings From a 21st-Century Prophet
Sunday 5 June 2011
by Max Eternity
Truthout | Multimedia Interview


"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie."

-Dr. Cornel West

"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy."

-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Can America's collective economics inform who we are as a people, whereby - through obsessive bean-counting - we sculpt our destiny, tacitly sanctioning the stripping of basic dignity from fellow citizens, the erosion of civil liberties, the evisceration of public education policies, of the arts and humanities, bankrupting entire communities, tarnishing longstanding values of the populace and its self-image, thus ultimately destroying all that was once valuable to society?

For even after the world swooned from the megahype of England's latest royal wedding and the hip, hip, hurrah of President Obama's ordered assassination of Osama bin Laden, a cornucopia of catastrophic socioeconomic horrors - in addition to America's continued unpreparedness for natural disaster - still face this nation: endless war, long-term unemployment, swelling prison populations and multiple years of record-breaking home foreclosures.

All of these problems may be well on their way to becoming the new normal in the US, but they won't be here to stay if a certain brilliant, black man of prophetic word and deed can help it - namely, Dr. Cornel West.

West equates America's banking elite with gangsters and deplores President Obama's choice to surround himself with their minions - Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers et al. This well-heeled phalanx of criminals is, in West's view, to blame for many, if not most, of America's current ills.

In a moment when the clatter and chatter of austerity economics has reached a fever pitch, West observes that some elected officials and policymakers want to take austerity to yet another level of penny-pinching belt-tightening, which almost always means cutting America's already-anemic social programs to depressed new lows of paucity. The union-busting in Wisconsin and elsewhere assures the near-irreversibility of those lows.

It would seem money is tight, except when it comes to finding $100 million a day to drop bombs on Libya. That's a peculiarity that serves as proof that, no matter how supposedly broke the country is, the American government seems to always have a blank check handy for certain things, such as the ambiguous and wildly unsuccessful war on drugs, and the war on terror.

President Obama once embodied the promise of a glorious future for this nation. In these times, however, West points out that Obama's leadership more or less represents a renaissance denied, a platform of unfulfilled assurances.

President Obama, he said in an interview with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges, is the, "black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats." Yet such criticisms come much to the chagrin of some African-American heavyweights like Al Sharpton, who recently appeared on MSNBC saying that, "too many of us are putting it all on the president," and Melissa Harris-Perry, who wrote in an article published in The Nation that many of West's comments were "utter hilarity."

West stands firmly by his remarks. For all the president's super-sophistication and caviar oration, in West's view, the enduring fact remains that almost everything Obama has chosen to put in place, such as the Summers-Geithner economic team, spells business as usual. This pattern leads to one to question: does hope minus change equal more of the same ... a la Dubya?

"To be human, you must bear witness to justice," West writes in his book, "Hope on a Tightrope," for, "[j]ustice is what love looks like in public." It's an idea that West is passionate about, even though truth and justice might seem antiquated in this waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay world where wars of aggression have become commonplace.

Nevertheless, in a podcast recorded in his Princeton University office on April 27, 2011, West dug deep into his passion for justice and his kinship and empathy for the poor and working class, and also shared what it means to be a "funkmaster." It was an electrifying conversation in which West spoke frankly about the Obama administration and the unfolding developments in Egypt and other nations of that region. He also spoke about some of the more private joys in his life, such as the particulars of his favorite musical legends. This discourse came after enjoying a shared round of homemade gourmet cookies from renowned cake masters Ellen Baumwoll and Cheryl Kleinman at Betty Bakery in Brooklyn. It was a chat that found West imparting wisdom about the critical importance of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) Works Projects Administration (WPA) as an example from which America could be learning. He also provided some illumination as to why Obama has not chosen the course of reigniting FDR's grand civic plan in a way that is appropriately nuanced for today.

"For me, I come out of a black freedom movement that is on intimate terms with death," West says. "The social death of slavery ... civic death, Jim Crow ... psychic death, taught to hate ourselves ... but America," he says "is a death-dodging, death-denying, death-ducking culture - so they clash."

In the dialogue, West spoke of the power of love, too, illustrating the idea by holding up Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as both a unified field and contrasting manifestations of what love means in action.





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American Racism, Right Wing Demagoguery, and the 2012 National Presidential Election

http://www.theroot.com/print/52804

All,

Jack White is a well known and deeply respected veteran black journalist who worked for Time and Newsweek magazines for nearly 30 years and is also a very savvy political analyst (extra note: He was born and raised in Oakland, California). I think he's 100% right about the upcoming 2012 election (I and many other people I know have been saying the exact same thing as Jack in this article). I thoroughly agree with his assessment of the reasons why as well. Cornel should not have gone off on the President in such nasty personal terms in public though I can well understand why he feels personally betrayed by Obama because of the very active role he played in his campaign, the major public endorsement that Cornel gave the President in 2008, and Obama's subsequent snubbing of him since he became President. But Jack's right--we should always keep our most important and necessary political criticisms of the President focused exclusively on POLITICS alone and not descend into personal spite because that kind of rhetoric does play into the racist right wing's hands (though I thoroughly agree with Cornel in his fundamental POLITICAL criticisms of Obama). But since the national election of ANY white Republican political alternative to the President would be an absolute major catastrophe for black people, the United States, and the world, it's gonna be absolutely necessary that Obama be re-elected in 2012. There's no doubt about that...

Kofi


Published on The Root
(http://www.theroot.com)


Forecasting a Nasty 2012 Campaign
By Jack White
May 28, 2011
The Root

RightWatch: White rage and a dearth of new Republican ideas should result in a noxious and racially tinged campaign next year.

As many a would-be prophet can attest, predicting the future is one surefire way of making yourself look ridiculous. When your prognostication goes wrong, the only ones who look sillier than you are those who believed in the forecast.

Take, for example, radio Bible thumper Harold Camping, who whipped legions of evangelical Christians into a frenzy by claiming that the rapture, in which the faithful would be literally spirited up into heaven, was going to take place last Saturday. Lo and behold, we -- and he -- are still here. But instead of curing Camping of being a seer, that seemingly incontrovertible piece of evidence only forced him to revise his schedule. He now says the end of the world will take place on Oct. 21, and I hope he is right.

That's because the coming of doomsday this fall would spare us what I boldly predict will be the nastiest, most racially charged presidential campaign in decades, perhaps even since the Civil War. That's not because the developing field of Republican candidates is a pack of rabid race-baiters. Indeed, so far only one of them, the inimitable Newton Leroy Gingrich, has descended into that gutter with his charge that Barack Obama is "the most successful food stamp president in American history."

Despite the GOP's long history of exploiting white fear for political gain, I doubt that the eventual nominee will make such a blatant racist appeal. He or she won't have to. Their surrogates or those in charge of supposedly independent expenditures will handle it for them. And it will simply be in the air.

My fearless forecast is not based on the personalities of the candidates but on what analysts call the objective factors: the underlying social context in which the campaign will unfold. And right now it's setting up as a perfect storm for racially charged resentment on the far right, even if the candidates make no overt attempt to exploit it. Here are three of my reasons, two pretty obvious and one less so:

* White people are really angry. According to a hugely publicized study by Tufts University researchers, a growing number of whites believe that race relations are a zero-sum game in which every inch of black progress is offset by an increase in discrimination against whites. Indeed, the researchers contend, many whites have now convinced themselves that bias against people like themselves is a bigger problem than anti-black prejudice. The most obvious symbol of black progress -- and of their own setbacks -- is none other than the man who will be at the top of the Democratic ticket next year: the first African-American president.


* The Republicans don't have winning issues. The triumph of Democrat Kathy Hochul this week in a special election in a historically conservative district in upstate New York underscores my belief that when right-leaning Republicans actually spell out what they stand for, independent voters flee in droves. In this case, the central issue was conservative budget guru Paul Ryan's radical plan for replacing Medicare with a voucher system that would force seniors to pay substantially more for their health care, which has been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Republicans in both the House and Senate.

In addition to defending that unpopular proposal, the Republican nominee will have no bold new ideas to push. The much ballyhooed job-creation plan that the GOP released this week is just more of the same-old, same-old combination of tax breaks for the wealthy and big corporations and a pullback on regulation that got us into this economic mess. And with the death of Osama bin Laden, any attempt to paint Obama as a weak commander-in-chief chief will be an exercise in futility.

* Finally, Obama's critics on the left have opened the floodgates. One of the unintended consequences of Cornel West's impassioned recent attack on Obama is that by sinking into ad hominem claims about the president's character, he implicitly sanctioned the validity of similar charges from the right. There is not, after all, that much difference between accusing Obama of being afraid of "free black men" because he was reared by Caucasians, and bashing him for possessing a Kenyan anti-colonial view of the world that he supposedly got from his African daddy. How left-wing critics expect to combat right-wing efforts to paint Obama as an exotic outsider after they indulge in equivalent mudslinging is a conundrum that only a highbrow philosophy professor can resolve.

So there you have it: a conservative electoral base seething with anti-black resentment, combined with an unpopular platform and a de facto go-ahead from the left to portray Obama as some kind of alien. That's a witches' brew for what could easily spill over into a truly noxious explosion of racially tinged politicking, even if the eventual Republican standard-bearer never explicitly brings up the subject.

Hey, maybe my fearless forecast isn't really all that fearless. There doesn't seem much to stop it from coming true -- unless Camping's dreadful prophecy is fulfilled and we don't have to worry about it.

Jack White is a regular contributor to The Root.

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Black Public Intellectuals Cornel West and Melissa Harris-Perry Debate the Policies of the Obama Administration on the 'Ed Schultz Program' on MSNBC

http://www.thenation.com/authors/melissa-harris-perry

All,

Ever heard of being able to chew gum and talk/walk/gawk at the same damn time?...Yeah, yeah I thought you had...Me too!...Which is all the more reason why these endless tirades about the personal and political behavior of (black and white) public intellectuals by other (black and white) intellectuals are so often utterly bizarre and hopelessly and hilariously DUMB--especially when the real major subtext of and reason for these rhetorical jibes and jabs have far more to do with what the Obama Administration is or is not doing and whether one generally supports or is actively critical of the actual performance of the President of the United States vis-a-vis U.S. corporate elites, The Republican and Tea parties, Wall Street, the massive imperialist war machine (ever heard of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan folks?), not to mention chronic structural unemployment, the dire need for major education, Health care, and financial reform, and transparency in government (just for starters)...

In the following scathing, witty, and highly lucid piece Melissa Harris-Perry eloquently and judiciously takes her Princeton colleague Cornel West to task for stupidly conflating silly personal motives with serious political ones in his most recent critique of the President in his interview with Chris Hedges and does a fine, wicked job of exposing the fundamental hypocrisy of West's friend Tavis Smiley's own fawning public relationship with the corporate elites of Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, and McDonald's, among others in their ongoing contradictory claims to "speak truth to power" in the current national economic crisis. Perry goes on to also point out that tenured university professors with large salaries and considerable access to material resources and institutional support that the "average citizen" could not possibly equal puts them both in a privileged position that must be honestly confronted, acknowledged, and accounted for in their own publicly critical assessments of the meaning of events and issues facing the national body politic--especially as it relates to the actual policy positions and programs of the President. Perry's clear-eyed ability to cut through the fog of personal ego and self serving grandstanding is thus important and timely and generally can't or shouldn't be dismissed...

Yet at the same time it must also be said that despite whatever obvious flaws, shortcomings, weaknesses, and contradictions of public intellectuals from academia it's very important that one not lose sight of whatever substantive critical analyses by West and Perry can be and have been made of President Obama and the national government as well as the wealthy elite economic and political institutions and interests that they far too often service and privilege above the masses of people. So that even though West has had a bitter and contentious 'personal' relationship with the former major Obama economic advisor Lawrence Summers in the past when Summers was still the President of Harvard and Cornel still taught there, it is still important to recognize that his intrepid critique of Summers goes far beyond their own personal acrimony and speaks directly to West detailing and exposing the reactionary economic policy 'advice' Summers gave to the President that he and the Democratic Party later implemented. Given these larger realities one must not lose sight of the far bigger and vastly more important responsibility of truly speaking truth to power and publicly advocating and fighting for radical grassroots change via the instruments of mass organizations and actual political involvement and participation. In other words there is ample room and a great necessity for real useful knowledge that even privileged academics and intellectuals can and must provide if their commitment is to a much broader vision that goes far beyond that of mere ego reinforcement and taking idle 'personal' potshots at professional colleagues and associates who also seek a forum that exceeds that of the corrupt and cynical soundbite obsessed media and the lucrative financial and head expanding lures, temptations, and traps of the national lecture circuit...

Kofi


Cornel West v. Barack Obama
by Melissa Harris-Perry
May 17, 2011
The Nation

Professor Cornel West is President Obama’s silenced, disregarded, disrespected moral conscience, according to Chris Hedges’s recent Truthdig column, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West went Ballistic.” In a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic, Professor West offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.

West begins with a bit of historical revision. West suggests that the president discarded him without provocation after he offered the Obama for America campaign his loyal service and prayers. But anyone with a casual knowledge of this rift knows it began during the Democratic primary, not after the election. It began, not with a puffed-up president but when Cornel West’s “dear brother” Tavis Smiley threw a public tantrum because Senator Obama refused to attend Smiley’s annual State of Black America. Smiley repeatedly suggested that his forum was the necessary black vetting space for the Democratic nominees. He needed to ask Obama and Clinton tough questions so that black America could get the answers it needed. But black America was doing a fine job making up its own mind in the primaries and didn’t need Smiley’s blessing to determine their own electoral preferences. Indeed, when Smiley got a chance to hold candidate Clinton “accountable” he spent more time fawning over her than probing about her symbolic or substantive policy stances that impacted black communities. Fiercely loyal to his friend, Professor West chose sides and began to undermine candidate Obama in small and large ways. Candidate Obama ceased calling West back because he was in the middle of a fierce campaign and West’s loyalties were, at best, divided. I suspect candidate Obama did not trust his “dear brother” to keep the campaign secrets and strategies. I also suspect he was not inaccurate in his hesitancy.

West may have had principled, even prophetic reasons, for choosing this outsider position relative to Obama, but it is dishonest to later frame that choice as a betrayal on the part of the president. After what I had written about Senator Clinton during the campaign I wasn’t expecting an offer from the State Department.

Furthermore, West’s sense of betrayal is clearly more personal than ideological. In Hedges’s article West claims that a true progressive would always put love of the people above concern with the elite and privileged. Then he complains, “I couldn’t get a ticket [to the inauguration] with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration…. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.” Let me get this straight—the tenured, Princeton professor who collects five figures for public lectures was relegated to a hotel television while an anonymous hotel worker got tickets to the inauguration! What kind of crazy, mixed-up class politics are these? Wait a minute…

What exactly is so irritating to West about inaugural ticket-gate? It can’t be a claim that the black, progressive intellectual community was unrepresented. Yale’s Elizabeth Alexander was the poet that cold morning. It can’t be that the “common man” was shut out because the Neighborhood Ball was reserved for the ordinary women and and men who worked to make Obama ’08 possible. It must be a simple matter of jealous indignation. While I appreciate the humanness in such a reaction, it hardly counts as a prophetic critique.

Since the inaugural snub, Professor West has made his personal animosity and political criticism of the president his main public talking point. There was that hilariously bad documentary with Tavis Smiley and the rest of the Soul Patrol in 2009. There is the tiresome repetitiveness with which West invokes the name of his erstwhile Harvard nemesis Lawrence Summers as indicative of President Obama’s failed economic vision. And just a few weeks ago there was the eminently watchable screaming match on MSNBC where love-the-people West called Rev. Al Sharpton a “mascot” for the Obama administration. Add to this three-year screed the current Hedges article and it looks more like a pissing match than prophecy.

Take for example West’s ad hominem attack on the president’s racial identity.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men.… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation.”

This comment is utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Princeton, New Jersey. And it is hard to see his claim that Obama is “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they” as anything other than a classic projection of his own comfortably ensconced life at Harvard and Princeton Universities. Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.

Let me be clear, being an Ivy League professor does not mean that one has no room to offer critical engagement on issues of race. Like Professor West, I too make my living at elite, predominantly white institutions. For the past five years we were on the same payroll at Princeton. Like Professor West I supplement my income by giving lectures about race, politics and history. Like West, I hope to influence policy, inspire individuals and intervene in public conversations about race. My criticism of West is his seeming unwillingness to acknowledge how our structural positions within the academy and in public intellectual life can be just as compromising to our position vis-à-vis black communities as is President Obama’s.

As tenured professors Cornel West and I are not meaningfully accountable, no matter what our love, commitment or self-delusions tell us. President Obama, as an elected official, can, in fact, be voted out of his job. We can’t. That is a difference that matters. As West derides the president’s economic policies he remains silent on his friend Tavis Smiley’s relationship with Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo and McDonald’s—all corporations whose invasive and predatory actions in poor and black communities have been the target of progressive organizing for decades. I have never heard him take Tavis Smiley to task for helping convince black Americans to enter into predatory mortgages. I’ve never heard him ask whether Tavis’s decision to publish R. Kelley’s memoirs might be a less than progressive decision. He doesn’t hold Tavis accountable because Tavis is his friend and he is loyal. I respect that, but I also know that if he were in elected office the could not get off so easily. Opposition research would point out the hypocrisy in his public positions in a way that would make him vulnerable come election time. As a media personality and professor he is safely ensconced in a system that can never vote him off the island. I think an honest critique of Obama has to begin by acknowledging his own privileges.

Instead, West seems determined to keep black politics tethered to a patronage model of politics. He tells Hedges:

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested…”

God help us if Cornel West and Tavis Smiley getting arrested is our last chance at a democratic awakening.

I have many criticisms of the Obama administration. I wrote angrily about his choice of Rick Warren to deliver a prayer at the inauguration. I have spoken on television about my disagreement with drone attacks in Pakistan and been critical of the administration’s initial choice to prosecute DADT cases. I worked for more progressive health care reform legislation and supported organizations that resisted the reproductive rights “compromises” in the bill. I’ve been scathing in public remarks and writings about the President’s education policy. My husband leads a nonprofit that is suing HUD for its implementation of a discriminatory formula in the post-Katrina Road Home program. The president has never called me. I got my ticket to the inauguration from Canada! (Because Canadian Broadcast Television who gave me a chance to narrate the day’s events.) But I can tell the difference between a substantive criticism and a personal attack. It is clear to me that West’s ego, not the health of American democracy, is the wounded creature in this story.



About the Author:

Melissa Harris-Perry
COLUMNIST
The Nation

Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough. She is a contributor to MSNBC.