In Defense of Cornel West: Is Barack Obama Right, or Has Michael Eric Dyson Lost His Mind?
Carl Dix with Cornel West at a recent anti-police terror march.
By Carl Dix and Lenny Wolff
April 22, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
(Right
now Carl is in Baltimore focused on the fight against police murder and
mass incarceration. Given, however, the seriousness of the attack
against Cornel West, he and I have talked at length about this, and I am
writing for us both. Lenny Wolff)
This Sunday, the New Republic posted
a vicious attack on Cornel West, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” by Michael
Eric Dyson. This attack is not an academic dispute; it is a hit job
against a deeply principled intellectual who refused to put away his
critical faculties when Obama took office, who has increasingly stepped
out into the struggle against murders by police and mass incarceration,
and who has done so in a way that condemns and exposes the crimes—and
yes, they are crimes—of the Obama Administration. All the sound and fury of Dyson’s long rant cannot hide that essential, and shameful, fact.
On
one level, Dyson’s attack is beneath contempt and barely merits reply.
But because principle and intellectual rigor are currently so debased
in this society, and because powerful forces seem intent on promoting
Dyson’s takedown of Cornel West, reply we must.
Instead
of making a reasoned critique of Cornel West’s actual positions, Dyson
vacuums up a toxic brew of speculation on personal motives, rumors,
criticisms from all kinds of quarters (some of which he says he doesn’t
even agree with), and out-of-context bits and pieces from West’s
personal life (taking special advantage of moments where Cornel made
himself vulnerable by confiding personal regrets), and then he spews
this all over his readers.
Dyson has combined this brew with
mis-readings of key concepts developed and/or worked on by West (the
rise of nihilism in the Black community during the 80’s/90’s, the role
of prophecy as a strand in Black leadership, the relevance of jazz to
intellectual undertakings, etc.) that are as superficial as they are
willful. All of this is designed to overwhelm people’s critical
faculties and hide the actual substance of what Dyson is attacking and
defending. This is what passes for intellectual criticism in the era of
reality TV. Let’s look at what Dyson says.
First,
Dyson indicts Cornel West for a lack of new thought. Dyson must not
have read and listened to West lately, for surely he would have noticed
that Black Prophetic Fire is actually a further development of
West’s thinking on a number of very important questions. West uses the
form of conversations about six pre-eminent figures in the cause of
Black emancipation. He draws out the contributions and shortcomings of
each as he sees it, and in the process further develops his thoughts on
the particular role of the Afro-American people in US history and the
current day, the (varying, multiple and sometimes contradictory)
qualities of what he calls prophetic leadership, the challenges posed by
the current era, among other things. Yes, this is a different form, in
keeping with West’s drawing on the jazz tradition—this is improvisation
on a theme, done collectively in dialogue with someone who has
differing but overlapping views. How refreshing!
The
actual content of WHAT Cornel gets into here—what he is driving at, how
he is posing and approaching these questions, the actual evaluations he
makes of these different signal historical figures, the synthesis he is
driving at and our respective “takes” on this—is beyond the scope of
this letter. What is relevant here is that Dyson, in claiming that West
has no new thinking, never actually engages what Cornel has been saying, in this and other works and forums. This kind of blatant non-engagement should be seen as unconscionable and ruling whoever does it out of any sort of serious consideration.
Second,
Dyson dismisses Cornel West’s work of the past six years as driven by
personal spite. Please! What a commentary on this gossip-driven
culture that such a claim has any legs at all. One of us, Carl, has
actually been in public dialogue with Cornel at least half a dozen
times, stretching from the June 2009 dialogue on “In The Age of Obama:
What Future for our Youth?” to a dialogue this month on the emergency of
murder by police. You can see these dialogues for yourself on-line, or
you can check out any of the other dialogues that Cornel has done with a
whole range of people over these past years—including the recent
unprecedented dialogue with Bob Avakian at Riverside Church this past
November on revolution and religion—and even a few minutes should
convince you that Cornel West’s critique of Obama focuses on questions
of empire and of Obama’s actual actions as the head of that empire. (It
is—again—stunning, and a sad commentary on intellectual discourse
today, that Dyson feels he can get away with attacking Cornel West and
never once mention the word “empire” in the whole steaming 9500-word
heap.)
If
the stakes were not so high, it would be almost comical when Dyson
instructs Cornel in “how to deliver criticisms of Obama to Black
audiences.” Dyson says you have to start with how much you love and
respect Obama and his “achievement” of becoming President, then
acknowledge the animosity he’s incurred among the racists and fascists,
and only then offer your criticisms for his “missteps and failures.” As
Carl strongly pointed out in discussing this with me, this pat little
formula totally leaves out the fact that Obama is Commander-in-Chief of
the biggest empire in the world, and is raining down terror and horror
on people in that role, and these are CRIMES and not “missteps.” Dyson
then boils Cornel’s supposed inability to follow the formula to West’s
“lack of respect” for Obama, when the key difference between the approaches of Dyson and West is precisely whether you expose the objective ROLE of Obama.
Third,
it is telling—and speaks very much to the point and purpose of Dyson’s
screed—that he delivers a back-handed slap at the fact that Cornel West
has increasingly assumed a front-line and very important role in the
struggle against police murder. Dyson goes so far as to say that this
activity is nothing but stunts for the camera.
Let’s
look at the facts. One of us, Carl, co-founded the network to Stop
Mass Incarceration with Cornel in August of 2011 in a basement meeting
with a dozen other people and nary a camera in sight. The first action
of this network was to link up revolutionaries and anti-police brutality
activists with the Occupy movement in October of 2011 to do a series of
civil disobedience actions against Stop-and-Frisk in New York. Yes,
Carl, Cornel and the others involved sought to make this known, to get
this outrageous abuse in the front of the cameras—innocent as charged!
Cornel came to critical, out-of-the-limelight meetings where strategy
and political will was forged with the parents and relatives of police
murder victims, immigrant rights activists, clergy, and many others and
he made time on a number of occasions to speak at events organized by
parents and clergy in particular, and to lend his name and platform to
their cases. It is highly ironic that the New York actions against the
police a week ago which Dyson briefly cited in his New York Times op-ed
of Friday April 17 were part of national actions which Cornel and Carl
led in calling for and helped to organize, including at a critical rally
where the two spoke on April 6 in NYC leading up to these actions.
Nellie
Bailey of the Harlem Tenants Council (at mic) speaks at a 2012 rally
before the opening day of the trial for 20 people who were arrested at a
Harlem police precinct during an October protest against NYPD
stop-and-frisk practices. Behind her are (from l.) defendants Elaine
Brower, Cornel West and Carl Dix.
What
exactly is Dyson’s problem with all this? Is it that during these past
few actions West has been quoted making the point that here we are
six-plus years into the reign of a Black president, Black attorney
general, and Black head of “Homeland Security” and there has not been a
single successful federal prosecution of murder by police? That in fact
this crime has grown during their reign?
(And
here it has to be said, in the face of Dyson’s accusations of egotism,
that—as Carl often points out—Cornel has gone out of his way since 1996
and the first time they worked together to credit others and bring them
into the spotlight, and more generally to reference the work of others
and graciously point to their contributions at any opportunity, even
when this goes against the grain of his audience. In many ways, Cornel
West fights to represent what Bob Avakian has called the “largeness of
mind and generosity of spirit” so badly needed in society today.)
Dyson’s
rant takes on what would, again, be comical proportions were it not for
the stakes and dangers of these times when, toward the end of his
piece, Dyson delivers his pathetic list of Obama’s “achievements.”
These are supposed “left-wing” accomplishments that Obama has carried
out while cleverly pretending to “talk right.” Here Dyson blots out and
covers over Obama’s record as deporter-in-chief, his refusal to even
half-heartedly criticize murders by police (let alone do anything about
them) until not doing so would have seriously undermined his legitimacy
among Black people, his defense of draconian surveillance and attacks on
those daring to reveal these crimes, his all-out support for Israel’s
genocidal attacks on Gaza, his vicious military predations and outright
war crimes from Afghanistan to Libya and most recently Yemen (where,
with true Obama-esque double-talk, he now “condemns” the Saudi
airstrikes that he himself authorized!), etc. And as Dyson once knew
when he (correctly) took a whole book to go after Bill Cosby’s
“pull-up-your-pants” poison, “talking right”—as Obama does when, at his
“Brother’s Keeper” press conference in 2014, he all but openly blamed
the murders of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis on absent Black fathers
(when such “absences” have everything to do with the very consciously
designed genocidal policy of mass incarceration)*,
or when Obama does his own Bill Cosby imitation at places like the
Morehouse graduation ceremony in 2014—has seriously bad consequences.
There is a further irony here when Dyson, who praised Race Matters when
it came out, now faults Cornel West’s criticism of nihilism in that
book as “blaming the victim.” First of all, read the damn book and
engage it—get into what he’s actually saying and if you, Dyson, have
changed your opinion on it now, say why you agreed back then and why you
now have changed your mind. More to the point, it’s really outrageous
to say this about Cornel, when a large part of his vocation over decades
now has been precisely to uphold, defend and stand with in deed as well
as word “the least of these”—those who have been cast out, stigmatized,
demonized, despised, incarcerated and murdered by this system.
I
want to conclude by saying that Carl particularly emphasized to me that
one has to wonder at the timing of this attack when the network which
he and Cornel co-initiated has just mounted a mass outpouring against
police murder on April 14, making a major contribution to reseizing the
offensive on this for the movement as a whole. You have to wonder at
the timing of this compendium of cheap shots, rank distortions and
half-truths, right when we are beginning what promises to be a long hot
summer, to invoke that 60’s term—a time when the police have been
emboldened by the Justice Department’s whitewash of Darren Wilson’s
murder of Michael Brown but
when masses of people are increasingly refusing to take this, and not
so persuaded by those who would want them to work within the system, and
when the Obama administration that Dyson so cherishes has no real
answers to this horror.
You have to wonder as well why Dyson
offers not reasoned criticism or disagreement, but a really foul farrago
of snark, half-truths and straight-up slanders, seemingly designed to
destroy a rare and important truth-teller and, increasingly, front-line
activist at just this crucial time.
Michael Eric Dyson: which side are you on?
*
The conference on Brother’s Keeper took place just days after the
anniversary of Martin’s unpunished murder by the vigilante George
Zimmerman, and shortly after Jordan Davis’ killer had been found not
guilty, in his first trial, of the homicide of Davis. It is painfully
ironic that for all of Obama’s emphasis about absent fathers, the very
real presence of both these fathers in their sons’ lives could not
prevent white supremacy from murdering them.
Bay Area Asian Coalition Against the War
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