Cornel West |
I went with the family – Taku and Amy (we left the girls at
home) – to hear Cornel West talk to a packed house last night at San
Francisco’s Nourse Auditorium. It was,
for me, a thrilling experience. It’s
rare these days that people get up and talk in public and I find myself in agreement
100% of the time. OK, so maybe thrilling is overstating it, but I was
quite taken with his rhetorical skill.
Really quite bowled over with the power of his language. Not just the words. The smack-down power of his frank assessment
of American shame.
Amy thought it was worth hearing what he had to say, but in
talking about him later, at an 11 p.m. Thai dinner after the show, she began her
comments with some reservations. Taku
found the entire experience a disappointment.
It was clear we were all processing the evening differently,
and I was surprised that they would be anything but bowled over, like I was, so
I decided it was time to just sit and listen.
At some point West made a comparison between Beyoncé and
Aretha Franklin. He had made much about
the gradual decay of the black community and the fact that they were so easy to
co-opt and his implication was clear that it had to do with the loss of soul –
spirituality – and its replacement by sensuality. Joy, he said, was what it is about. Not pleasure.
Aretha, not Beyoncé. I took to
the comparison instantly. Amy found
something wrong with the patriarchal tendency to make pronouncements on women
who are acceptable and women who are not.
She didn’t disagree with what he said.
She was just resonating with the feminist in the audience who challenged
him on the comparison.
Taku was disappointed for a number of reasons, not at all impressed with the fire and laser-beam intensity and the skill to rattle off thousands of bits of information with no notes in sight. If you know Cornel West at all, you know he
fills his talks with references to the world of jazz, the blues and black musical
greats of all stripes. He has an encyclopedic knowledge and apparently a photographic memory and can
run down lists of names, dates, song titles, event venues, tossing out references by the dozens. If you stand outside that musical tradition,
your head spins. I think that talent of
his makes your head spin if you’re inside the tradition even more, actually,
but the key is whether or not you are lifted up by inclusion or left out and
wondering what it’s all about.
That was a talk by a black man to
a black audience. Primarily. Not entirely.
He addressed the state of black men, particularly young black men in
America and every American is affected by the social decay he describes. But if you are not intimately familiar with
the black cultural tradition, where music, according to West, has always been
the only way to hang on to your last bit of integrity when all your dignity has
been removed – by not being allowed to bury your dead, for example (he doesn’t
shy away from the legacy of slavery) – then you cannot connect as well with
his message. Taku complained, too, that
there was so much applause he couldn’t hear the second half of half of West’s
sentences. Or so it seemed to him. I was more interested in noting that he was
used to this and always made his points clear by the time the applause
started. He really is a master orator.
I too lack the musical knowledge he assumes his audience
has, but I have a native speaker’s love of the language he uses to tell his
story. I can tell the difference
between a clanging cymbal of a preacher and a man like West who has the
rhetorical skills to lift you out of your seat because you are hearing somebody tell it like it is. It doesn’t
bother me that he is not quietly analytical, or that he doesn’t produce a
how-to manual in response to the dilemmas he ticks off. West once said somewhere, “In these downbeat
times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis,” and last
night was much more a pep-talk than a lecture, as I suspect most of West’s
speeches are.
Even so, his speech was riddled with words like catastrophe, decay and destruction. Thoughtful people have a right to say that we
don’t need more dwelling on the obvious – we live with serious social and
political decay – what we need are solutions.
But sometimes thoughtful people miss the woods for the trees. I think what Taku was missing was that West
wasn’t teaching his audience the answers.
He was creating a space where the answers would be most likely to stick,
once they were eventually identified.
And the answers are hard to swallow, because they involve personal
transformation, the most difficult of all responses to any situation. The answers are spiritual ones, and we live
in a far too cynical age to know what to do with spiritual answers when we hear them.
West didn’t need to set up the surface problems. His audience knew we spend more money on
incarcerating black youth than we do on educating them, that we spend more
money killing people in foreign countries than we do creating jobs in America,
that we have a policy of dividing and conquering those on the bottom of the
ladder, that we can silence the would-be opposition to national policy by
setting the poor against each other, persuading part of us that the rest of us
are freeloaders. He went right to work
on underlying problems, using W.E.B. DuBois four questions:
1. How does integrity face oppression?
2. What does honesty do in the face of deception?
3. What does decency do in the face of insult?
4. How does virtue
meet brute force?
This is a well-rehearsed show. He has had years to put it together. Call it a dog and pony show, if you want to
be cynical. I call it a rare moment of
telling it like it is. You can get a
sense of the talk by clicking here, where he gives you some
of the content. Only the smallest taste
of the fire of last night’s performance, however. Watching him deliver his message to a select
TV audience is like watching a movie on a small screen that belongs on a large
one, the large screen analogy being a black audience who magnifies the rhetoric
with call/response.
"Justice is what love looks like in public spaces; tenderness
is what love is like when you are alone."
That and other quotes by Cornel West are available here.
The word thrilling came
to mind to describe my response to
West’s address last night not merely because he is a stirring speaker and
because his topics are justice, truth and love – although that’s a large part
of it. I was drawn in because I feel we
are currently beset with devastatingly overwhelming challenges. Racism, America’s national curse, has been
exposed in the police killings of black men now being captured on our mobile
phones, but also in the efforts of political leaders to take voting rights away
from black folk so hard fought a generation ago. Our culture is rotten to the core. We are programmed to think the individual is
all, and that leaves us prey to those who would buy us out. Money now buys the media, it buys the Supreme
Court, Congress, the White House. Only
those with real bucks can participate in the political process with any hope of
having any effect. And I think when all
is said and done, how we answer W.E.B. DuBois’ four questions is all we really have
left to work with. Even if the will to repair could
be found, the mechanisms of repair seem to have slipped out of our hands.
I think we are treading water. Waiting for a time when we may some day find
the courage to distribute the wealth of the nation in a way that builds us all
up. Find the money for repairs to bridges
and roads and the rest of the nation's infrastructure, find the will and the money to create free education from pre-school through
university, with serious attention to those coming from gutted out places of illiteracy and despair. Recognize that when our
money goes into drones that kill children on the other side of the world we
bear responsibility for it. That when we think the mega-rich are entitled to their billions because they earned it on their own, we are wrong.
Some day we will do more than talk about these things till the cows come home. For now, we preach to the choir. Not because the choir is going to get things
done. But because the choir will have to
keep the songs alive until we figure out how to stop the violence we inflict
on the world. And begin to see ourselves as others see us.
3 comments:
Alan, Thanks for this wonderful review of West's talk. We are, in America, treading water as you say. This has been made ever clearer to me last week when I finished reading Alice Goffman's "On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City" (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2014). Goffman details inner city Philadelphia, and I feel certain she describes every urban black neighborhood in America. In time, we will see that she has detailed, precisely, the relationship between so very many young black men and the justice system of which Ferguson is just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
Similar to West's comment about Justice:
"Justice untouched by mercy is minimalistic and stinting in its response to persons. Justice is incipient love and thus has some native ties to generosity and enthusiasm. A society whose "justice" is calculating, cold and miserly will not rise to the needs of persons."
Daniel Maguire, A New American Justice, 1980.
A wonderful review (of a talk I didn't hear), Alan. As a nation, we have much to learn from the black church experience as filtered to us by people like Cornel West, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, and on and on. It's perhaps no accident we've sought to keep that experience on the margins of American culture for a very long time. It's too revolutionary and too transformative for many of us to want to entertain it seriously.
I appreciate especially Cornel West's and bell hooks's overt avowal of support for gay rights as long ago as 1991 in their book "Breaking Bread"—and their challenge to black churches that want to ridicule and exclude gay folks in that book.
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