Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” is the best-known line from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride.
But I’m concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in
more universal terms: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.”
Even an angry Almighty can’t compete with mortals whose love turns to
hate.
Cornel West’s rage against
President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. He has accused Obama
of political minstrelsy, calling him a “Rockefeller Republican in
blackface”; taunted him as a “brown-faced Clinton”; and derided him as a
“neoliberal opportunist.” In 2011, West and I were both speakers at a
black newspaper conference in Chicago. During a private conversation,
West asked how I escaped being dubbed an “Obama hater” when I was just
as critical of the president as he was. I shared my three-part formula
for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man
and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony
he faces as the nation’s first black executive; and target his missteps
and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect
him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape
history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: “Well, I guess
that’s the difference between me and you. I don’t respect the brother at
all.”
West’s
animus is longstanding, and only intermittently broken by bouts of
calculated love. In February 2007, West lambasted Obama’s decision to
announce his bid for the presidency in Illinois, instead of at
journalist Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union meeting in Virginia,
calling it proof that the nascent candidate wasn’t concerned about black
people. “Coming out there is not fundamentally
about us. It’s about somebody else. [Obama’s] got large numbers of white
brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties, and he’s got to
speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length.” It is
hard to know which is more astonishing: West faulting Obama for starting
his White House run in the state where he’d been elected to the U.S.
Senate—or the breathtaking insularity of equating Smiley’s conference
with black America.
Despite West’s
disapproval of Obama, he eventually embraced the political phenom,
crossing the country as a surrogate and touting his Oval Office bona
fides. The two publicly embraced at a 2007 Apollo Theater fundraiser in
Harlem during which West christened Obama “my brother... companion and
comrade.” Obama praised West as “a genius, a public intellectual, a
preacher, an oracle,” and “a loving person.”
Obama
welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and
an intellectual icon among the black masses. If black American scholars
are like prizefighters, then West is not the greatest ever; that title
belongs to W.E.B. Du Bois. Not the most powerful ever; that’s Henry
Louis Gates Jr. Not the most influential; that would include Nobel Prize
winner Toni Morrison, Black History Week founder Carter G. Woodson,
historian John Hope Franklin, feminist bell hooks, Afrocentricity
pioneer Molefi Kete Asante—and undoubtedly William Julius Wilson, whose
sociological research has profoundly shaped racial debate and the public
policies of at least two presidents. West may be a heavyweight champ of
controversy, but he has competition as the pound-for-pound greatest:
sociologists Oliver Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, and Lawrence D. Bobo;
historians Robin D.G. Kelley, Nell Irvin Painter, and David Levering
Lewis; political scientists Cedric Robinson and Manning Marable; art
historian Richard J. Powell; legal theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and
Randall Kennedy; cultural critic Tricia Rose; and the literary scholars
Hortense Spillers and Farah Jasmine Griffin—all are worthy contenders.
Yet
West is, in my estimation, the most exciting black American scholar
ever. At his peak, each new idea topped the last with greater vitality.
His fluency in a remarkable range of disciplines spilled effortlessly
from his pen, and the public performance of his massive erudition
inspired many of his students to try to follow suit, from religious
studies scholars Obery Hendricks and Eddie Glaude Jr. to cultural
critics Imani Perry and Dwight McBride. West may not be Muhammad Ali,
Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jersey Joe Walcott, or Sugar Ray Robinson. He’s
more Mike Tyson, a prodigiously gifted champion who rose to the throne
early and tore through opponents with startling menace and ferocity. His
reign was brutal, his punch devastating, his impact staggering.
It was that sense of scholarly excitement that drew me to West after I read his first book, Prophesy Deliverance!,
in 1982. The book validated the intellectual passion I’d courted in my
youth, never leaving me as I navigated some challenging circumstances. I
had been a promising student from a Detroit ghetto who won a
scholarship to a prestigious boarding school outside of town on the
condition that I repeat the eleventh grade. I confronted racism head on
for the first time at that new school, and it rocked me: I was expelled
during my second year for poor performance. I returned to the inner city
and the prospect of collecting my diploma at night school. I got
married and became a teenage father, one who worked in an auto-supply
factory and hustled odd jobs after high school. I didn’t start college
until the fall of 1979, one month before my twenty-first birthday. That
same year, I divorced my son’s mother after moving South to attend the
historically black Knoxville College. My father died two years later,
and I made do for a spell with the only material inheritance he could
pass on: a Chevy station wagon that had once served as the work vehicle
for our Dyson & Sons grass-cutting, sod-laying, and odd jobs
enterprise. Over the next few years, I served as pastor of three
different churches in Tennessee while completing my degree at
Carson-Newman College, 20 miles northeast of Knoxville, where I
transferred in 1981 to get a firmer footing in my study of philosophy.
Hiroko Masuike / Getty Images
Before
breaking with then-Senator Obama, West was an ardent supporter,
appearing with him at a 2007 fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
When
West’s book was published, my phone service at home had been shut off
because I had no money to pay the bill. There was a pay telephone
outside the laundromat where I washed my clothes, and one day, instead
of doing the laundry, I spent my last $5 calling West at his Union
Theological Seminary office in New York City. I rhapsodized about his
philosophical acumen and cutting-edge theories of race for a while, and
West let on that he had heard about me from a mutual friend and
encouraged me to stay in touch. I took him at his word and soon
scrounged up the money to drive the 600 miles from Tennessee to see him
deliver a series of talks at Kalamazoo College.
West
had not yet freed himself from reading his lectures to develop the
rhetorical style for which he is justly celebrated: an extemporaneous
exploration of ideas that features the improvised flourishes and tonal
colors of a jazz musician and the rhythmic shifts and sonic
manipulations of a gospel preacher. Yet even then West mesmerized,
effortlessly surfing the broad waves of Western thought, defending the
notion of black humanity while laying siege to white
sectarianism—proving by his own impossibly literate performance that
white superiority was a lie, at least as long as his gap-toothed mouth
spit out esoteric knowledge.
West
and I became dear friends. I admired his penetrating intellect and he
nurtured my deepening commitment to a life of the mind. West wrote a
letter of recommendation on my behalf when I applied to graduate school
in 1984 and helped me to land at his alma mater Princeton, where he had
been the first black student ever to earn a doctorate in philosophy, and
where I became the second black student to earn a doctorate in
religion. West had a huge crush on the R&B singer Anita Baker, and I
got us tickets to see her perform in New Jersey. After a brief
backstage introduction to the singer I had finagled, West relived his
high school track glory and sprinted up the street in glee.
As
a graduate student, I arranged for West to lecture at Princeton in the
late ’80s, before he was an academic superstar, and I can still remember
how he inventively grappled with the decline of European domination,
the rise of American hegemony, and the decolonization of Third World
countries, even as he spoke of the pervasive influence of black culture
in the broader life of the nation, citing Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot,
Lionel Trilling, and Frantz Fanon as major witnesses to the trends he
outlined. I had observed literary scholar Houston Baker dazzle another
Princeton audience with a dynamic and dramatic lecture, but West topped
that performance with the sheer breadth of his inquiry and the erudite
ad-libs to his written presentation.
West’s early work was a marvel
of rigor and imagination. He rode the beast of philosophy with
linguistic panache as he snagged deep concepts and big thinkers in his
theoretical lasso and then herded thousands of stalking students into
Ivy League classrooms packed to the rafters. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West invited Foucault to sing the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in the black revolutionary choir. The American Evasion of Philosophy
(1989) ingeniously pitched American pragmatism as a multiracial
conversation that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Du Bois, and Richard
Rorty. And in Keeping Faith (1993), West
gathered a slew of seminal essays on subjects like social theory and the
philosophy of religion—baptizing poststructuralist thought in American
waters while translating the insight of its biggest European stars with
analytical verve.
At the age of
39, West catapulted to fame after struggling financially and became,
deservedly, a far richer man with the publication of his best-known
work, 1993’s Race Matters. It isn’t a scholarly
book, per se, although its pages carry the weight of his formidable
intellect as he traces the cultural dynamics of race with exquisite and
uncharacteristic—for the time—lucidity. (Dense jargon was at its zenith
in the postmodernist academy of the 1990s.) Race Matters changed how we
speak of black identity in the United States. It gave our country a
golden pun for matters of race that mattered more than they should and
brought West the sort of celebrity that is intoxicating and distracting.
West garnered glowing profiles in Newsweek and Time—in
the same week—and explored his ideas on radio with Terry Gross and on
television with Bill Moyers and Bill Maher. There was a certain
satisfaction in West’s rise: One of the smartest men of his generation
also became one of its most popular.
Anthony Barboza / Getty Images
Cornel West at Princeton in 1994, the year of the publication of Race Matters, the book that made him an academic celebrity.
The
intellectual landscape had shifted dramatically beneath West’s feet by
the time Obama went after the presidency. The Internet and social media
ushered in new voices on the nation’s most vexing problems and made room
for fresh thinking on race and identity. Even as the pace of West’s
published scholarship slowed, he remained a powerful cultural presence.
If West’s most notable book argued that race mattered, his celebrity and
iconic status meant that his endorsement also mattered.
West
remained allied with Obama until he took the White House and, in
football parlance, faked left and ran right. “[Obama] posed as a
progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,” West complained in an
interview with Salon. “He acted as if he was ... concerned about the
issues of serious injustice and inequality, and it turned out that he’s
just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical
flair.” It’s worth noting that the president’s actions were in keeping
with the demands of his profession: Like most recent Democratic
politicians, Obama nodded in a progressive direction while campaigning
but toed a more centrist line when it came time to govern. What
distinguishes West is that he assailed Obama’s insufficient leftism and
proclaimed it a racial betrayal. “I would rather have a white president
fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight
of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and
drones,” he told The Guardian.
Long
before their ideological schism, however, West believed himself
personally betrayed by Obama because of his (supposed) disinterest after
the election. It is a sad truth that most politicians are serial
rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates, leaving behind
scores of briefly valued surrogates and supporters. West should have
understood that Obama had had similar trysts with many others. But West
felt spurned and was embittered.
This
is where Congreve’s insight on love decomposed to rage comes crashing
in. West has repeatedly declared that he did 65 engagements for the
presidential campaign in 2008, and was offended when the president
didn’t provide tickets to the inauguration. (Obama later told me in the
White House that West left several voice messages, including prayers,
from a blocked number with no instructions of where to return the call, a
routine with which I was all too familiar.) In a 2011 interview with
Chris Hedges on Truthdig that appeared under the headline “The Obama
Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic,” West recalled his
indignation during the Inauguration, when he arrived at his Washington
hotel with his mother, and she noted that the bellman had a ticket to
the event but not her son. “I couldn’t get a ticket for my mother and my
brother,” West said. “We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up
my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says,
‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t
get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’” Thus the
left-wing critic found it unjust that the workingman and not the
professor had a ticket to the inauguration. Only in a world where
bankers and other fat cats greedily gobble rewards meant for everyday
citizens would such a reversal appear unfair. J.P. Morgan might have
been mad; Karl Marx would have been ecstatic.
This
moment for West followed a pronounced and decades-long scholarly
decline, something that did not escape the notice of other academics and
intellectuals, none more notably than Lawrence Summers, the former
president of Harvard, who clashed publicly with West. (West departed
Harvard for Princeton in 2002.) Summers had reprimanded West for his
varied side projects, everything from advising Reverend Al Sharpton’s
failed presidential bid to his vanity musical ventures. I couldn’t
endorse these criticisms, but I knew Summers was right when he pointed
to West’s diminished scholarly output. It is not only that West’s
preoccupations with Obama’s perceived failures distracted him, though
that is true; more accurate would be to say that the last several years
revealed West’s paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work, a trend
far longer in the making. West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas
today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits. He
hasn’t published without aid of a co-writer a single scholarly book
since Keeping Faith, which appeared in 1993, the same year as Race Matters.
West has repeatedly tried to recapture the glory of that slim classic
by imitating the 1960s-era rhythm and blues singers he loves so much:
Make another song that sounds just like the one that topped the charts.
In 2004, West published Democracy Matters, an obvious recycling of both the title and themes of his work a decade earlier. It was his biggest seller since Race Matters.
Even a cursory survey of West’s recent work captures the noticeable diminishment of his intellectual force. Hope on a Tightrope (2008)
is mostly a collection of West-ian wisdom spoken and then transcribed.
The cover features West standing at a blackboard with the words “What
Would West Say?” chalked again and again, like an after school
punishment, a haunting hubris suggesting a parallel to “What Would Jesus
Do?” His memoir Brother West (2009) is an
embarrassing farrago of scholarly aspiration and breathless
self-congratulation—West, for instance, deems his co-authored book The War Against Parents (1998) a “seminal text”; praises Race Matters as “the right book at the right time”; and brags that Democracy Matters sold over 100,000 copies, landed at No. 5 on TheNew York Times bestseller
list, and “continues to influence many.” None of this competes with the
description on West’s website of his first spoken word album, Sketches of My Culture,
which claimed at the time of its release that in “all modesty, this
project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.”
Brother West
was co-written with David Ritz, a writer best known for album liner
notes and ghostwriting entertainers’ biographies—a sure sign of West’s
dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual. It’s one
thing for Ray Charles to turn to Ritz; another thing entirely for a
top-shelf scholar to concede that he can’t write for himself, or is too
busy to do so. It is akin to Du Bois hiring Truman Capote to fashion his
autobiography. The journalist David Masciotra called The Rich and the Rest of Us
(2012), which was also co-authored, this time by Tavis Smiley, “a cover
version of a hit performed better by other singers—Barbara Ehrenreich,
Joseph Stiglitz, and William Julius Wilson, to name a few.” West’s
latest, Black Prophetic Fire, published last
year, is another talk book, this one edited by Christa Buschendorf, a
German scholar who interviewed West. Last October, Masciotra reviewed Fire
for The Daily Beast, and called it “a strange and disappointing
culmination of [West’s] metamorphosis from philosopher to celebrity,”
one that is in keeping with “his pattern of not solely authoring any
books in the past ten years.” If you’re counting: That’s two talk books
and two co-authored ones across a decade—not quite up to the high
scholarly standard West set for himself long ago.
In Brother West,
West admitted that he is “more a natural reader than natural writer,”
adding that “writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline,”
but that he reads “as easily as I breathe.” I can say with certainty,
as a college professor for the last quarter century, that most of my
students feel the same way. What’s more, West’s off-the-cuff riffs and
rants, spoken into a microphone and later transcribed to page, lack the
discipline of the written word. West’s rhetorical genius is undeniable,
but there are limits on what speaking can do for someone trying to
wrestle angels or battle demons to the page. This is no biased
preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a
champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar
versus talker. Improvisational speaking bears its wonders: the emergence
on the spot of turns of thought and pathways of insight one hadn’t
planned, and the rapturous discovery, in front of a live audience, of
meanings that usually lie buried beneath the rubble of formal
restrictions and literary conventions. Yet West’s inability to write is
hugely confining. For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped
through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning
comes clean—or as clean as one can make it.
Kevin Mazur / WireImage
West
has criticized progressives for being tempted by fame and power. But as
this appearance with Jay Z in 2010 demonstrates, he is far from immune
to the allure of celebrity.
The
ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the
deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an
often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally
discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once
one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink.
Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does
speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least
delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks.
Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can
think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine
if better and deeper things can be said.
Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses.
West
admires the Socratic process of questioning ideas and practices in
fruitful dialogue, and while that may elicit thoughts he yearned to
express anyhow, he’s at the mercy of his interlocutors. Thus when West
inveighs, stampedes, and kvetches, he gets on a roll that might be
amplified in conversation but arrested in print. It’s not a matter of
skillful editing, either, so that the verbal repetition and set pieces
that orators depend on get clipped and swept aside with the redactor’s
broom. It’s the conceptual framework that suffers in translating what’s
spoken to what’s written, since writing is about contrived naturalness:
rigging the system of meaning to turn out the way you want, and making
it look normal and inevitable in the process.
An essential tenet of West’s arguments,
and the centerpiece of his public identity, is his belief about
prophets, and more important, his claim to be one. West’s follow-up to Prophesy Deliverance! was Prophetic Fragments, a 1988 collection of essays, lectures, and speeches. Two more volumes followed in 1993: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times and Prophetic Reflections.
“I am a prophetic Christian freedom fighter,” West wrote in one essay,
adding in his memoir, “I see my role as ... someone who feels both a
Socratic and prophetic calling.”
Prophets
in the Judeo-Christian tradition draw on divine inspiration to speak
God’s words on earth. They are called by God to advocate for the poor
and vulnerable while decrying unrighteousness and battling injustice.
Among black Americans, prophecy is often rooted in religious stories of
overcoming oppression while influencing the moral vision of social
activists. Black prophets are highly esteemed because they symbolize
black resistance to white supremacy, stoke insurgence against the
suppression of our freedom, inspire combat against social and political
oppression, and risk their lives in the service of their people and the
nation’s ideals. They remind us of the full measure of God’s love for
the weak and unprotected, especially in an era when prophecy has been
co-opted, turned into a bland cultural commodity, and marketed as the
basis for enterprising exploits of major corporations or for political
gain.
We see this phenomenon each
year during the birthday celebration for Martin Luther King Jr., one of
the greatest figures in both black and U.S. history, and someone who is
revered as a prophet. Fast food corporations trumpet King’s message of
togetherness and yet often fail to pay a living wage to their workers,
even as conservative politicians pay homage to King’s memory while
implementing voter ID laws that imperil the franchise for millions of
black citizens. The same culture that killed King now seeks to kill
contemporary expressions of his prophetic itinerary, by portraying
today’s activists, such as those found in #BlackLivesMatter and the
movement to end police brutality, as the moral opposites of his social
vision and ’60s-era nonviolent protest. The argument over who and what
is prophetic has rarely been more heated in black culture than it is
now.
The model of the charismatic
black male leader has come in for deserved drubbing since it overlooks
the contributions of women and children that often went unheralded in
the civil rights movement and earlier black freedom struggles. Queer
activists sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, underscoring the
unacknowledged sacrifice of black folk who are confined to the closets
and corners of black existence. Even those who enjoy a direct
relationship to King and to Malcolm X haven’t escaped scrutiny. Louis
Farrakhan is faulted (and praised) for his distance from Malcolm’s
racial politics, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been pilloried
for lacking King’s gravitas and grace. The truth of those assessments is
not as important as the value of the comparison: It holds would-be
prophets to account for standards of achievement both noble and
nostalgic, real and imagined.
Despite
the profusion of prophecy in his texts and talks, West has never
bothered to tell us in rich detail what makes a person a prophet. He
doesn’t offer a theory of prophets so much as announce their virtues and
functions while grieving over their lost art and practice. In Black Prophetic Fire,
West offers a sweeping assessment of contemporary black life: “Black
people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and
finding joy in empowering others,” he wrote. “Black people once had a
strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice.” Today, however,
“Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of
wealth, health, and status. ... [They] engage in the petty practice of
chasing dollars.”
West offers no
empirical proof for these claims; like so much of his recent work there
are assertions without sustained and compelling arguments, and certainly
no polls or studies that prove the increase in black materialism, or
individualism, or the decline in black prophetic beliefs and behavior.
West’s failure to carefully chart the history and ethical arc of
prophecy leads him to wild overstatement. To paraphrase Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, West may not
seek to define a prophet, but he knows one when he sees one, and quite
often, they sound just like him. This limp understanding of prophecy
plays to his advantage because he can bless or dismiss prophets without
answering how we determine who prophets are, who gets to say so, how
they are different from social critics, to whom they answer, if they
have standing in religious communities, or if God calls them.
West
has never given us detailed comparative analyses of prophets in
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Zoroastrianism, nor has he
distinguished between major and minor prophets. He hasn’t explored the
differences between social and political prophecy; examined the fruitful
connections between the biblical gift of prophecy and its cultural
determinants; or linked his understanding of prophecy to secular
expressions of the prophetic urge found in New Left radicalism, for
example, which led to Jack Newfield’s notable analysis of the movement
in A Prophetic Minority. (To be fair, Newfield
didn’t spend a great deal of time exploring prophecy either; but then he
didn’t fancy himself a prophet like West, nor did he viciously lambast
those who fall short of his expectations or standards.)
What
makes West a prophet? Is it his willingness to call out corporate
elites and assail the purveyors of injustice and inequality? The actor
Russell Brand does that in his book Revolution.
Is he a prophet? Is it West’s self-identification with the poor? Tupac
Shakur had that on lock. Should we deem him a prophet? Is it West’s
self-styled resistance to police brutality, evidenced by his occasional
willingness to get arrested in highly staged and camera-ready gestures
of civil disobedience, such as in Ferguson last fall? West sees King as a
prophet, but Jackson and Sharpton, who have also courted arrest in
public fashion, are “ontologically addicted to the camera,” according to
West. King used cameras to gain attention for the movement, a fact West
fails to mention in his attacks on Jackson, “the head house Negro on
the Clinton plantation,” and Sharpton, “the head house Negro on the
Obama plantation.”
The hypocrisy
in such claims is acute: West likewise hungers for the studio, and
conspicuously so. There he is on CNN, extolling his prophetic pedigree.
There he is on MSNBC, discussing his arrest in Ferguson while footage of
the event rolls. There he is in the recording booth making not spoken
word or hip-hop, but a grimly earnest sonic hybrid of speech and music,
and saying, “If I can reach one young person with a message embedded in a
sound that stirs his or her soul, then I have not labored in vain.”
There he is in The Matrix sequels, doing something he’s become tragicomically good at—playing an unintentional caricature of his identity.
West
most closely identifies with a black prophetic tradition that has deep
roots in the church. But ordained ministers, and especially pastors,
must give account to the congregations or denominations that offer them
institutional support and the legitimacy to prophesize. They may face
severe consequences—including excommunication, censorship, being
defrocked, or even expelled from their parishes—for their acts. The
words and prophetic actions of these brave souls impact their
ministerial standing and their vocation. West faces no such penalty for
his pretense to Christian prophecy.
West
might argue that not being ordained leaves him free to act on his
prophetic instincts and even disagree with the church on social matters.
Thus he avoids the negative consequences of ordination while remaining
spiritually anchored. That’s fine if you’re a run-of-the-mill Christian,
but there is, and should be, a higher standard for prophets. True
prophets embrace religious authority and bravely stand up to it in the
name of a higher power. The effort to escape responsibility should sound
an alarm for those who hold West’s views about how prophets should
behave. One need not be Martin Luther King to qualify as a prophet. But
when you claim to be a prophet, you are expected, as the classic gospel
song goes, to live the life you sing about in your song.
As
an ordained minister and professor, I know the difference between the
professorate and the pastorate, between prophets and scholars. When I
utter progressive beliefs about equal rights for women or queer folk as a
professor, I am sometimes lauded. When I was a church pastor—not a
prophet, something I have never claimed to be—the same sermon that
garnered praise from progressive scholars earned me scorn from church
officials and members and even cost me a pastorate when I tried to put
my beliefs into action and ordain women as deacons.
As
a freelancing, itinerant, nonordained, self-anointed prophet, West has
only to answer to himself. That may symbolize a grand resistance to
institutional authority, but it’s also a failure to acknowledge the
institutional responsibilities that religious prophets bear. Most
ministers are clerics attending to the needs of the local parish. Only a
select few are cut from prophetic cloth. Yet nearly all the religious
figures we recognize as prophets—Adam Clayton Powell Jr., King, Jackson,
Sharpton—were ordained as ministers. Powell and King were pastors of
local churches as well. To be sure, there are prophets who are not
ministers or religious figures—especially women whose path to the
ministry has been blocked by sexist theologies—but most of them have
ties to organizations or institutions that hold them accountable.
West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits.
West
has a measure of responsibility as a professor, but he enjoys far
greater freedom than most ministers or prophets. Professors have a lot
of flexibility in teaching classes, advising students, writing books,
and speaking their minds without worrying that a deacon board will
censor them or trustees will boot them out. Prophets, as a rule, don’t
have tenure. West gets the benefits of the association with prophecy
while bearing none of its burdens. By refusing to take up the cross he
urges prophetic Christians to carry, West is preaching courage while
seeking to avoid reprisal or suffering. Playing it safe means that West
doesn’t qualify for the prophetic role he espouses.
West’s
lack of understanding of the prophetic tradition is perhaps most
evident in his criticism of Sharpton and Jackson. He berates them for
their appetite for access to power, their desire for insider status.
Even if we concede for the moment that this is true, it isn’t a failure
of their prophecy but of West’s ability to distinguish between kinds of
prophets. In his 1995 book, The Preacher King,
Duke Divinity School Professor Richard Lischer noted that in ancient
Israel, the central prophet moved within the power structure, reminding
the people of their covenant with God and also consulting kings on
military matters and issues of national significance. Peripheral
prophets were outsiders who embraced the poor, criticized the monarchy,
and opposed war.
West ignores
these variations, which results in an idealized, and deeply flawed,
portrait of King as a peripheral prophet who was only useful when he
hugged the margin. But that, Lischer argued, is a distorted rendering of
King’s prophetic profile:
As a central prophet, Martin
Luther King had been deeply involved with the Johnson administration’s
efforts to pass civil rights legislation. Beginning already in the
Eisenhower administration and increasing steadily throughout the
turbulent Kennedy years, he had been regularly consulted on matters of
interest to the Negro in America. After the March on Washington, Kennedy
had scrambled to align himself with King’s beautifully articulated
ideals. In some of Lyndon Johnson’s early civil rights speeches, King
was gratified to hear echoes of his own ideas. No black leader had ever
enjoyed comparable access to the Oval Office and the power it
represented.
King moved
from central to peripheral prophet in his last few years with an
emphasis on economic justice and antiwar activism—views he grew into as
he wrestled with his conscience, his staff, and the folk to whom he was
accountable. But West’s insistence that only peripheral prophets are
genuine and powerful is undercut by the legislation King helped to pass
as a central prophet: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
King was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed
power with his influence and vision. When West begrudges Sharpton his
closeness to Obama, he ignores the fact that King had similar access.
Sharpton
and Jackson moved in the opposite prophetic direction of King. While
King kissed the periphery with courageous vigor after enjoying his role
as a central prophet, Jackson, and especially Sharpton, started on the
periphery before coming into their own on the inside. Jackson’s
transition was smoothed by the gulf left by King’s assassination, and
while forging alliances with other outsiders on the black left, he
easily adapted to the role of the inside-outsider who identified with
the downcast while making his way to the heart of the Democratic Party.
Sharpton,
lacking the leeway that derives from a leader’s violent death, had
instead to kill his persona; the rabble-rousing and inflammatory style
of his early days is gone. West remains an elite academic and can hardly
be said to have ever been a true outsider, given his position in the
academic elite and the upper reaches of the economy, but he hungers to
be seen as rebellious. In truth, West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and
bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue
when lashing one-time colleagues and allies.
Leon
Wieseltier famously derided West’s work as “almost completely
worthless” in these pages 20 years ago. And although I strongly disagree
with Wieseltier’s views of West’s early works, it would be fitting for
West to downsize his ambition and accept his role as a public
intellectual, social gadfly, or merely a paid pest. There’s nobility in
such roles, and one need not dress up one’s intellectual vocation as a
prophetic one. West may draw on prophetic insight; he may look up to
prophets on the front lines; and he may even employ prophetic
vocabularies of social dissent. But none of that makes him a prophet.
One of West’s heroes, Malcolm X, said that just because a cat has
kittens in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits. That’s what philosophers
call a category mistake.
If West’s harangues against Obama
are not the words of a prophet, then how do we account for his
extravagant excoriations? They might be explained with a bit of the
moral psychology West likes to apply to the president. West said in 2011
that “my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black
men,” because as a biracial child growing up in a white world, “he’s
always had to fear being a white man with black skin.” West said that
when Obama “meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.” Yet
Obama wasn’t too frightened to confront West. According to Jonathan
Alter’s 2013 book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies,
at the 2010 National Urban League convention, Obama barked at West,
“I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?” Other foul words were
uttered, West added, and Obama “cussed me out.” A photo of the exchange
exists: West frozen like a dear brother in the headlights as he smiled
broadly and stood speechless.
The
irony is that, as highly charged as his criticism has become, West is,
in some ways, not that different from Obama. The president has long
wished to be the grand architect of bipartisanship, the conciliator of
left and right, the bridge between conservatives and liberals. West used
to fancy himself a similar figure; at least he did when he was riding
high on best-seller lists as a progressive icon. West sought to account
for the suffering of black America by steering between the arguments of
conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists. He thought it was
important to acknowledge self-inflicted injuries as well as dehumanizing
forces. As Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist at Queens College, has
argued, West set himself up as “the voice of reason and moderation
between liberals and conservatives,” as the “mediator between
ideological extremes.” Obama has similarly argued that black folk must
cultivate moral excellence at home and in the community even as he
admits the government must help fight black suffering.
West’s
prescription for what ails black folk—and a big part of Obama’s plan,
too—involves a personal and behavioral dimension beyond social or
political change. For West, the cure is a politics of conversion fueled
by a strong love ethic. “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or
analyses; it is tamed by love and care,” West wrote in Race Matters.
“Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul.
This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth—an
affirmation fueled by the concern of others.” Obama believes the blessed
should care for the unfortunate, a hallmark of his My Brother’s Keeper
initiative. West and Obama both advocate intervention for our most
vulnerable citizens, but while West focuses on combating market forces
that “edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed
down by preceding generations,” Obama, as Alter contends, is more
practical, offering Pell grants; stimulus money that saved the jobs of
hundreds of thousands of black state and local workers; the Fair
Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity of sentences for
powdered and crack cocaine; the extension of the Earned Income Tax
Credit, which kept millions of working poor blacks from sliding into
poverty; and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps,
which helped millions of blacks.
Associated Press / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Barack
Obama confronted West about his criticisms at the 2010 National Urban
League convention: “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?”
The
odd thing is that Obama talks right—chiding personal irresponsibility
in a way that presumes the pathology of many black families and
neighborhoods—but veers left in his public policy. West, on the other
hand, talks left but thinks right in his notion of nihilism and the
factors that might reduce its peril. In Race Matters,
West argued that the spiritual malady of “nihilism” is the greatest
threat to black America—not racism, not class inequality, not material
hardship or poverty or hyperincarceration. Steinberg rightly argues that
it “takes hairsplitting distinctions, that do not bear close scrutiny,
to maintain that West’s view of nihilism is different from the
conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the
chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Steinberg
says that despite “frequent caveats, West has succeeded in shifting the
focus of blame onto the black community. The affliction is theirs—something
we shall call ‘nihilism.’” West did as much to slam the poor with his
stylish, postmodern update of ghetto pathology and blame-the-victim
reasoning as any conservative thinker. He gave the notion ideological
cover because it got a sexy upgrade from a prominent leftist. As much as
West berates Obama’s neglect of the poor, his own writing brought them
harsher visibility than they deserved.
The
conservative underpinnings of West’s views on nihilism make his
confrontations with progressives like Melissa Harris-Perry, a Wake
Forest professor and MSNBC host whom he helped to recruit to Princeton
in 2006, curious to say the least. The conflict with her stemmed from an
essay Harris-Perry wrote in 2008 for The Root accusing Tavis Smiley of
throwing “a temper tantrum” because Obama had declined to attend his
State of the Black Union conference in New Orleans that year. In the
article, Harris-Perry also jabbed at West for levying the same criticism
at Obama for skipping the event in 2007. Smiley, West, and their
supporters, she wrote, had created a “false, racial litmus test” for
Obama, one that he failed simply by not showing up.
Harris-Perry again attacked West in 2011 in The Nation,
decrying his “self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped
in the discourse of prophetic witness.” West, she wrote, “offers thin
criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego
of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely
supplanted in recent years.” West fired back in a 2012 Diverse
magazine interview, saying, “I have a love for the sister, but she is a
liar, and I hate lying.” West called Harris-Perry “the momentary
darling of liberals,” but he “pray[ed] for her because she’s in over her
head. She’s a fake and fraud.” Harris-Perry told Diverse that she left
Princeton for Tulane in 2011 after some members of the African American
studies department blocked her promotion to full professor.
If
West is no prophet but instead a dynamic and once-indispensable social
critic, neither is his nastiness the echo of divine disfavor from on
high. In a 2014 interview on HuffPost Live, Morehouse College Professor
Marc Lamont Hill challenged West about his attacks on his fellow black
progressives. West compared himself to biblical prophets Jeremiah and
Amos, contending there is “a certain intensity to prophetic language
that hits deep and seems to be unfair, but is coming from a place of
such righteous indignation.” Not content to be in league with mere
prophets, West compared himself with Christ, with those who disagreed
with him cast in the role of the Lord’s unprincipled opponents. “If we
could hear what Jesus was saying when he ran out the money changers in
the temple, it was not polite discourse.”
If
this isn’t the height of self-righteousness, it is the depth of
delusion and exegetical corruption—isolating and then interpreting a
text to sanctify his scurrilous views. But West’s broadsides lack a
crucial element. Lischer argued that late in his career King, too,
“began to give full vent to his rage.” But unlike West, King’s “was the
holy rage of the prophetic tradition, and not the resentment or
vengefulness of his nationalist critics, to which he lent his voice. His
prophetic forebears, as it were, taught him how to get mad, what themes to press, and what language to use.”
In
his callous disregard for plural visions of truth, West, like the
prophet Elijah, retreats into a deluded and self-important belief in his
singular and exclusive rightness. But God reminded Elijah that his
prophetic exclamations were wrong. He instructed him to rest and
recognize that he wasn’t the only one left who believed in God or bore
witness to the truth. But these words mean nothing to West, who, after
all, isn’t a prophet. He cannot retreat, and he relentlessly declares
his humility to shield himself from the prophet’s duty of pitiless
self-inventory.
West and I
participated in several State of the Black Union meetings, as well as a
2010 roundtable in Chicago to address the black agenda. I expressed love
for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back, arguing
that Obama the president is Pharaoh, not Moses: a politician, not a
liberator. Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider
principled support and sustained criticism of Obama, a posture that
didn’t mirror West’s black-or-white views—nor satisfy the Obama
administration’s expectation of unqualified support.
In The Center Holds,
Alter described a meeting Obama held with prominent black figures in
the Roosevelt Room of the White House, during which radio host Tom
Joyner “began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who
wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black
needs.” Alter wrote, “Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with
Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy,”
but that he got upset with “critics who ‘question my blackness and my
commitment to blacks.’” I said nothing to the president that day that I
hadn’t said many times over the years.
If
West’s accusation that some progressives are Obama apologists rings
false, his finding fault in those who crave access is downright
laughable. That’s because West shamelessly flaunts his proximity to the
rich and famous and takes pride in knowing there are powerful people who
love and admire him. It’s all there in West’s memoir, Brother West.
“It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand
piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard,” he writes. The “we”
includes Simon, West, and the opera singer Kathleen Battle, his
girlfriend at the time. West got to meet other famous people because of
Battle. “Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota,” and
Battle “introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James
Levine ... and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.” Then
there’s the time in 1998 that Warren Beatty phoned West and asked if he
could take a look at a film he’d just made. “When the film was over,
Warren turned to me and asked the $64,000 question, ‘Should I release
it?’ I didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s a fascinating
critique of capitalism and market-driven politics. I think ... [it]
needs to be seen.’” Thus we have West to thank for Beatty’s political
comedy, Bulworth. After giving the
actor-director the green light, West said he, Beatty, and their
filmmates for the night, Norman Mailer and his wife, “talked our heads
off till three in the morning.”
And
then there’s music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom West met after the
star’s attorney—“my dear friend Johnnie Cochran Jr.”—called him and
said, “Corn, Sean is in deep trouble,” asking West to come to court with
Combs for moral support during his trial for gun possession and
bribery. There’s the time he met the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg on a
flight from Chicago to Houston. “I spotted Snoop Dogg and, just like
that, announced publicly, ‘Lyrical genius on the plane!’” Or the time he
hung out with Prince, who “had graciously invited me to his Bel Air
mansion.” West said he was approached at Prince’s home “by a beautiful
Latina, who was overflowing with intellectual passion,” and at
“evening’s end, I told the sweet lady that it was a delight” as “Salma
Hayek went her way and I went mine.”
There are literally pages and pages of illustrious name-dropping in Brother West, a book that owes its subtitle, Living and Loving Out Loud,
to another boldface name—Bob Dylan. West was in an airport when Dylan’s
drummer approached him and said that the legendary artist loved and
respected West. The drummer relayed something Dylan said about the
professor: “‘Cornel West,’ said Dylan, ‘is a man who lives his life out
loud.’”
Perhaps West despises the
access of Sharpton and others to Obama because, unlike them, he has
heroically resisted such impulses and invitations. But he couldn’t hush
his enthusiasm when another president, Bill Clinton, invited him to the
White House after the publication of
Race Matters.
West said Clinton brought him to the Oval Office, “eager to engage in
serious intellectual conversation about culture and politics.” Writing
of Clinton, West says:
The brother was absolutely
brilliant and I was having a ball. When I looked at my watch, though, I
saw it was far into the middle of the night. We had been at it for
hours. I realized I had an early morning flight back to New Jersey to
teach at Princeton and needed just a little nod of sleep. But he was as
fresh as ever. I remember thinking to myself—Does this brother have a
job?—when I realized—He’s the president of the United States! I did
leave, but only after another hour of conversation.
West
offers himself a benefit that he refuses to extend to others: He can go
to the White House without becoming a presidential apologist or losing
his prophetic cool. He can spend an evening with the president, the
first of many such evenings, without selling his soul. West can delight
in meeting Clinton, with the sudden burst of recognition that he’s in
the presence of the president of the United States!—the
italicized enthusiasm is all his! West’s hypocrisy in the matter is
radiant;it shines through his belief that only he can resist the siren
call of presidential access and retain his “black card” and his
three-piece prophet’s robe of honor.
West’s attacks on me were a bleak forfeiture
of 30 years of friendship; it was the repudiation of fond collegiality
and intellectual companionship, of political camaraderie and joined
social struggle. I was a mentee and, according to West, who was kind
enough to write a blurb for one of my books, “a rare kind of genius with
organic links to our beloved street brothers and sisters.” But I had
somehow undergone a transformation in West’s mind: I was an Obama stooge
who had forsaken the poor. In November 2012, West, friend and mentor,
one of the three men whose name is on my Princeton doctoral
dissertation, let me have it in the national media.
It was during an appearance with Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now,
shortly after Obama’s reelection. “I love Brother Mike Dyson,” West
said. “But we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale.
Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister
Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama
pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after
Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want
to tell those kinds of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and
working people. And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the
Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background
that all of them have had at some point.”
West
was just warming up. After a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the
1963 March on Washington on the National Mall, a celebration Sharpton
led and at which I spoke, West argued that Martin Luther King Jr.
“would’ve been turning over in his grave” at Sharpton’s “coronation” as
the “bona fide house negro of the Obama plantation,” supported by “the
Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves
intellectually in a very, very ugly and vicious way.” And recently,
while promoting Black Prophetic Fire, West
argued “the Sharptons, the Melissa Harris-Perrys, and the Michael Eric
Dysons ... end up being these cheerleaders and bootlickers for the
President, and I think it’s a disgrace when it comes to the black
prophetic tradition of Malcolm and Martin.”
Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
West,
speaking at a 2014 rally, is renowned for an oratorical style that
combines elements of jazz improvisation and the cadences of a gospel
preacher.
West’s
aggressions brought me great sorrow. In his anger toward me I was
forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations
levied against him: that he was consumed with jealousy of Obama, that he
simply couldn’t abide the rise of a figure who eclipsed most other
black personalities for the time being and who, for many, even competed
with King for recognition as the “greatest black man in American
history.” I still don’t buy those theories, but I do think West’s deep
loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is
ultimately irrational—it’s a species of antipathy that no political
difference could ever explain. It is sad to think that West aimed at me
because my criticism failed to comport with his shrill and manic dispute
with the president; our lost friendship is the collateral damage of his
war on Obama.
In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him.
West
has sacrificed friendships and cut ties with former comrades because he
insists that only outright denunciation of Obama will do. It is a
colossal loss for such a gifted man to surrender to unheroic truculence:
If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then the loss of a brilliant
black mind is more terrible, more wasteful. At precisely the moment when
we could use the old West’s formidable analytical skills to grapple
with the myriad polarities that glut the political horizon, the new
West, already in the clutches of a fateful denouement, has instead
sought the empty solace of emotional catharsis.
If West was once Tyson
in his glory, he is Tyson, too, in his infamy. Once great, once
dominant, once feared, he is now a faint echo of himself. Like Iron
Mike, West is given to biting our ears with personal attacks rather than
bending our minds with fresh and powerful scholarship. Like Tyson, he
is given to making cameos—in West’s case, appearing as himself in
scripted social unrest, or playing a prophet on television in the latest
protest. He has squandered his intellectual gift in exchange for
celebrity. He’s grown flabby with disinterest in the work needed to stay
aloft: the readiness to read, think, and recast thought in the crucible
of written words.
West’s memoir
offers a poignant and honest accounting of his relationship with women,
and by extension, his relationship with Obama, who was, for a time, the
object of West’s profound political affection:
Because
I’ve never been an advocate of psychotherapy as a path to self-
understanding. . . . I’ve avoided such therapy because I worry about how
it might exacerbate narcissistic tendencies. . . . I’m not sure I know
myself well enough to share my whole self with others. This, in part,
might explain my volatile relationships with women. One might argue that
because I don’t know myself, the more time I spend with a woman, the
more various parts of myself emerge—parts that are, in fact, foreign to
me. In short, my whole self surfaces, and it is precisely my whole self
that strikes me as a stranger. To maintain a long-term and long-lasting
bond with a woman may require the kind of soul-sharing or self-sharing
that’s beyond my capability.
West’s
fears of his narcissistic tendencies seem to have come true in his
fight with President Obama. Hedges also used the language of the jilted
lover in describing West, noting that he “nurses, like many others who
placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated,
and betrayed.” West admitted to Hedges in their interview that he went
“ballistic” about Obama because he had been “thoroughly misled”; or, put
differently, he was crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on
him.
West’s narcissism in this
matter is not exemplified by his sense of being jilted but in the way he
has personalized his grief. And the longer West has nursed his
resentment, the more he has revealed parts of himself that even he may
not understand or be able to explain, since political disappointment in a
politician’s behavior rarely provokes such torrents of passion, such
protracted, dastardly, and sadly, such self-destructive hate. The
volatility that West said roils his personal relations may also mar his
political ones. Now he lumbers into his future, punch-drunk from too
many fights unwisely undertaken, facing a cruel reality: His greatest
opponent isn’t Obama, Sharpton, Harris-Perry, or me. It is the ghost of a
self that spits at him from his own mirror.
Cornel West supports the work of Black Arts Movement poet Marvin X, who says, "I appreciate the support of a revolutionary brother Cornel because he's not afraid to tell the truth about Pharaoh."
