Cornel West
Cornel West
Cornel Ronald Westis an American philosopher, academic, social activist, author, public intellectual, and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The son of a Baptist minister, West received his undergraduate education from Harvard University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1973, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1980, becoming the first African American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D. in philosophy. He taught at Harvard in 2001 before leaving the school after a highly publicized dispute...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth2 June 1953
CountryUnited States of America
We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.
Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.
Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.
When you say that [Martin Luther] King was a prophet, you don't say that he predicted anything; you say that he bore witness. He left a committed life so that people would never forget the suffering of people that he was connected to. King was prophetic because he lived a committed life. Now he did critique society, saying you're going to go under if you don't treat your poor right. I mean, that is part of prophetic calling, but it's not predicting anything.
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)
There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.
White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.
You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.
I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.