In a recent article in The Huffington Post, I argued that the debate over Cornel West's recent criticisms of President Obama should be redirected toward the important questions about domination that West has been raising all along. These are questions about the growing imbalance of power in American society and the Obama administration's failure to correct that imbalance.
Unfortunately, the blogosphere is still resounding with vitriolic denunciations of West. I cannot sit idly by while the personal attacks continue. That he has been my friend for more than three decades makes me a somewhat biased reporter on his character but also someone familiar with relevant facts.
I know, for example, that he owns only one car and has had it for many years. I also know that he spends a lot of time with his daughter in Germany. That these facts refute some things being posted on the Internet will give you some idea of how petty and hurtful the attacks have become, as well as how little concern for truth the most vicious attackers are exhibiting.
No one else I know has a stronger or steadier love of poor and working people than Cornel West. This love drives him. It explains nearly everything he does.
Hasn't he spent much of his adult life teaching in culturally elite universities and conversing with highbrow intellectuals? Yes. He does so for two good reasons. He takes joy in learning and he wants places like Princeton, Harvard and Yale to be as decent as they are wealthy.
Does his institutional location disqualify him from criticizing President Obama? No. It is because West has experienced the temptations of a career among the cultural elite that he understands the temptations the President faces while interacting with economic and political elites.
West knows, on the basis of his personal experience, that the temptations of such a setting are strong. One wants to be respected by the people one considers brilliant. And it is all too easy, when working with the privileged, to forget about the downtrodden. If the President knows this, he isn't showing it.
How does West deal with those temptations? He does not let a day pass without criticizing the divide between the Haves and the Have-Nots. He haunts the conscience of the Haves and brings hope to the Have-Nots. He would be the first to say that he has not always done so perfectly.
But let's be honest here. No one in my generation has more fully embodied the vocation of speaking truth to power, within the elite universities or without, than West. He has used his position to draw attention to the plight of the poor. There is no hypocrisy in that.
My books would have been very different had I not benefitted from West's encouragement, criticism and example. One is about threats to democratic discussion. Another is about the power of ordinary citizens. West never stops reminding me that I ought to use my influence to do what I can on democracy's behalf. He holds me to a high standard.
Teaching with West is one of the great benefits of my job. We have now taught at least half a dozen graduate seminars together, on topics ranging from Edmund Burke to analytic philosophy. One of them was on Hegel and his influence. I started off the first session by lecturing for an hour and a half on what a student needs to know about Kant in order to understand Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.
West then spoke on how trade routes in the north Atlantic affected the spread of Enlightenment ideas, on what Hegel learned from his roommates in seminary and on the meaning of key phrases in the preface of the Phenomenology. It was a breathtaking performance, the sort of thing that only a true intellectual who keeps up constantly with the relevant scholarship could do. I wonder how many of West's critics could have done what he did that afternoon.
One of the things I most appreciate about teaching with West is his deft way of ruling political correctness out of order. He insists that students come to terms with the full range of the Western canon, including the great conservatives. Everyone gets a fair hearing. When a student plays the race card, West hands it back.
West spends several days a week on the road, because he doesn't want his message to be confined to the academy. But I know of no instance in which he has missed a class. He doesn't merely attend dissertation defenses and public lectures, he often asks the best question. West's marathon office hours are legendary. He is more present to the Princeton campus during his three or four days a week than anyone else is in five.
For all of these reasons, I want to inform the public about the man I know. The picture of West's character now circulating on the Internet is false -- false in many of its details and false in the general impression it leaves. But what troubles me most about his critics is not the falsity of their claims. It is the delight they are taking in his pain. The German word for such delight is Schadenfreude. The English word for it should be poison.
Amarnath Amarasingam: Is President Obama a Sellout?
Cornel West - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cornel West Takes on Obama - Speakeasy - WSJ
Cornel West's criticism of Obama sparks debate among African ...
Obama - black or biracial - is a politician and needs to remain one.
He won't get re-elected otherwise. It's really that simple.
With all his Ivy League credentials, you would think that West would know this. And perhaps he does and is just choosing to ignore reality. Fortunately, some of us are just wired to be idealists forever. Cynicism just doesn't catch up with us.
Fine.
But we do need to think and talk about race issues more deeply and honestly. And that means laying off all the rhetoric - it really helps nobody. In my humble opinion - the Cornel West style of engagement just freezes the race debate.
~Addis
http://www.thoughtiswack.com/
To put it bluntly, West used the same line of attack that is common among freshmen of black American descent to shame those students of African descent whose ancestry lays elsewhere -- reading West's words was like a bad recap of my early undergraduate years, when "how down one was" was predicated on denying the fact that one was Caribbean-, Latin American-, Canadian-, or African descent- American to be "black."
Ironically, those same detractors upon my own negritude (I am Haitian-American) never seem to make it out of the ivory tower league, while I (and others who were disparaged by people using the same West tactic) actually went out to our communities and worked in the trenches, often belaying lucrative salaries to try to stem the results of poverty in our communities -- the same communities that made fun of our parents for not being immigrants because it was socially acceptable.
Here are some novel ideas: end corporate welfare, allow the Bush tax cuts to expire and cut the defense budget. Those would generate revenue and curb some wasteful government spending without causing further suffering to those who are worst off in our society. Dr. West expects a President who campaigned on rhetoric that championed these causes, and others in the same vein, to, at very least, fight the good fight. Instead, he sees a guy who acquiesces to the other side's demands from the jump, then leaves his supporters with the rotten fruit of his faux labor, e.g. health-care reform (What's the point without the public option?)
Much of the stimulus went to prop up state and municipal budgets and to limit unemployments in the public sector. There were some idealogical exceptions to bail out mission critical industries with large unions in swing states. Hi Detroit!
There are plenty of valid complaints about the Democrats targeting certian consituencies in this meltdown. Pirvately employed workers and non-swing state industry unions were given second class treatment. Wall Street got its pay offs undermining the GOP in 2012.
I don't much like the way West said what he did but I think it was honest. When Spike Lee films "Obamacare: the selling of the President" as a cross between "Bamboozled" and "Wag the Dog" we might get someone with the comedic talent to skewer the faux liberalism of the Obama administration.
Cornel West and other urban theorists published prodigiously through the years in the wake of Black Power and James Cone. Never have they been so seriously reduced to irrelevancy and bad faith by one of their own.
Want more disillusionment: Imagine a first-term McCain Presidency. Would things be that much different? The SCOTUS and the states will have the last words on DOMA and DADT and the last word on the fraud passing as health-care reform.
Would McCain have supported a pure jobs program that better served the US and Black Americans better than health-care mandates and shovel-ready projects? History will debate this for decades but the early reviews are in and aren’t favorable.
There's more disillusionment ahead for West. Hispanics are the new majority minority and combined with the political rise of conservative women and the LGBT movement, will proceed to marginalize the urban political theory that is West's stock in trade.
No one cares about America's 4th or 5th most influential minority group and legacy 60s civil right when the Chinese and Indian markets are calling and the pressure to increase Asian immigration outweighs the pressure to cater to those left behind in the cities.
That’s harsh but I doubt West is unaware of the change in social winds and Obama first-term is the shot over the bow.
2. used to be for gay marriage, then god came into the mix.
3. promised to end Iraq engagement--there are still 100,000 contractors and 50,000 troops, nearly 4 years later; Afghanistan has been "surged" to no effect under Obama;
4. Health care reform? Ha! used to be for single payer but that was thrown under the bus on day 1;
just a couple of examples--he has folded at the beginning of republican push-back on nearly every issue--he has telegrammed his intention to fold at the start of every negotiation. No group or position for whom or for which he has promised support has actually seen that support come to fruition. He sits idly by while women's control of their reproductive rights are assaulted nationwide, gay men and women are beaten or psychically beaten up on the airwaves, while black unemployment soars into record territory and while immigrants, legal or not, are harassed like plantation slaves throughout the country.
Want more? there's more to say...I don't like West but I think he was being nice about this man
2. He never said he was for gay marriage. He said he was in favor of civil unions.
3. He promised to end the Iraq war RESPONSIBLY. Which means that we leave when there is a stable Iraqi government that can deal with violent dissenters without descending into chaos and civil war. You almost never hear of any US casualties in Iraq anymore...and there is a clearly defined schedule for troop withdrawal.
Candidate Obama made it clear that he was going to escalate US involvement in the war in Afghanistan. A. Because he felt that Al-Qaeda forced that war upon us. B. That it was necessary to crush Al-Qaeda as a national security threat, and C. That it was necessary to degrade the threat that the Taliban presented to Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal.
I am amazed at the number of Progressives who seeme to have had SELECTIVE HEARING where this national security point is concerned. Despite the fact that he said it REPEATEDLY.
5. He threatened a veto when Republicans sought to defund planned parenthood. He cannot dictate to state legislatures what they can and cannot do. That is what the COURT system is for...and abortion rights activists are unwilling to file suit against the states because they are afraid that the current Supreme Court may strike down Roe v. Wade.
6. There is something called the FIRST AMENDMENT which grants people the right to say whatever they want (politically) without government censorship.
However; "When a student plays the race card, West hands it back." - apparently West handed the card not back to the student but to the President. His treatment of Obama's race, even though much less derogatory and offensive, is in the same form as the birthers. Al Sharpton said it best (paraphrasing) "Though Obama is a black president, he is not the president of black people."
If you elect a public official and they do not address their concerns then what do you do? What happens to a dream deferred.....
He argues, that the President's 8 years can be distilled down to 2 1/2 years, and he does so in one of the most blatantly personal and dishonest attacks against a sitting president I've ever seen. What I would ask Dr. West if I were a Princeton student is simple, since when did 8 years become 2 1/2?
I'll state clearly what people like me said when we read the rantings of West. How could a black intellectual simply not get it? The worst economy since the great depression, two wars inherited, a world in free fall, a walk in flux, and on top of all of that, the overt covert and obscene racism of the GOP. A senate which filibustered EVERY thing big or small, a political party not behaving like a political party and massive economic problems of a long term systemic nature. How does West ignore those things? How does any intellectual. But especially how does a black intellectual ignore the reality on the ground? The West piece was a travesty. It was neither truth nor courageous it was a ring and run, an attack for which the President has no defense. How does he prove his blackness to West's satisfaction? How does he prove he's down? For a life long Ivy League student and professor to throw the down card, is lunacy. Get your rear to a state school Cornell, then talk to me.
The president was presented with herculean task, and in many ways he has done so very much, but in others.... not so much.
The concern is at the end of the day will the president have restored things to the way they were or to some place better?
I reject your premise. The first black President isn't promised 2 years or 4. Killing him has always been in the wheelhouse of people who hate him. So the President came into this fight knowing that tomorrow wasn't promised. But West doesn't have that problem. he can see the future, and the promise of it, and he can intellectualize it.
Let's be real for a moment. If blacks had wanted the most short term gain from the election process we should have voted for Hilary. Why? Because if we had backed her over the first black candidate with an actual chance to win she would have owed us big. Huge. Very similar to the way that President Obama owes women. Hence, two supreme court picks, tons of cabinet and sub cab positions, and the first legislation being Lilly's Law, as well as a host of other women centric things. President Obama has done more for women than any other President, more for women than for blacks. But that is to be expected. Women can leave him and vote GOP vote someone else, blacks can't, and the first real of politics is you don't deal in self-deception. He has us and he knows it. So if we'd wanted max short term return then we go with Hil, and she owes us and the first supreme court pick would have been black, x amount of all appointments would have been black.
CONT
The Clinton's were great at the atmospherics of blackness but they didn't help our community long term in any real way. President Obama has. First, the Stim bill didn't forget us, it just didn't single us out in a specific way. 100 billion in education spending targeting inner city schools. That is the largest education bump in history and it targeted people of color. But West doesn't give Obama credit. Second, Health Care adversely affects blacks in a disproportionate way for a number of reasons; access to primary care, ER debt shift, bankruptcy, shorter life expectancy, the list is endless. By passing health care reform President Obama helped all Americans but no group got more benefit from the health care law, especially the way it was structured with hard caps on net income, than blacks. It is insane that West ignores this reality in a substantial way. Between the education and health care spending President Obama has done more too actually improve the mid and long term futures of blacks than any President since Lincoln freed the slaves. Seriously. It is the single largest economic shift for the black community in the modern era. It came without a fight about Race and because there was no fight about race, at least not overtly, West is steamed. he doesn't want to win he wants to fight, and it is that type of thinking that has kept the black community from substantive change for generations.
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