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
Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.
I have a whole lot of fun in trying to serve others and just keeping it funky, trying to keep it real, trying to ensure that we are able to be ourselves and get beyond these deodorized discourses and deodorized spaces that put on masks.
I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.
Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.
I had blackouts, fallen out, of course, the death threats, people showing up, putting guns to my wife's head with mask, and people having shot guns in the driveway, looking for me or announcing that I've already died before lectures and sending it through newspaper - sending it to newspaper columns they send my mother and so on. There's a real night side to my particular calling, which is try to bear witness to love and truth.
And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Rae is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).
The problem is we need much more moral content.
If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour.
I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort.
I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
There's a difference between just gaining access to a commodity as opposed to a spirit that allows us to live a life of love and justice, that when crisis and catastrophe hits you, that the biggest mansion in the world is not going to help you. If you don't have anybody who loves you, if you don't have any God who cares for you, that you're not going to have what it takes to move to the next stage in your life.
I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable.
As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.