Race Matters
by
Cornel West

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. p. xviii.

The painful truth is that there is no Donald Trump without Barack Obama, no neofascist stirrings without neoliberal polices—all within the imperial zone. p. xix

The military might of the American Empire—which, according to Common Dreams spends 53 cents of every taxpayer dollar in the US budget—casts a large shadow on our domestic life. p. xx

Another sign of hope is the Reverend William J. Barber II, the most Martin Luther King-like figure in our time. His Moral Monday movement and now the Poor People’s Campaign is… the last hope for prophetic Christianity in America. p. xxiii

The kind of hard-hitting, truth-telling work of Black Agenda Report—by Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberly Bruce Dixon Nellie Bailey, Ajamu Baraka and Danny Haiphong—helped to keep alive the Black radical tradition during the Obama years of Black celebration and capitulation. p. xxiii
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Since the prophetic fire lit by hope has been so damped by neoliberal chatter about “hope,” I prefer be a hope rather than talk about hope. Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth. p. xxiv

And all great love—like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme—is resurrectionary. p. xxv

The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic—precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. p. 2

Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitute elements of that life. p. 3

The verdict in the Rodney King case which sparked the incidents in Los Angeles was perceived to be wrong by the vast majority of Americans. But whites have often failed to acknowledge the widespread mistreatment of black people, especially black men, by law enforcement agencies, which helped ignite the spark. The verdict was merely the occasion for deep-seated rage to come to the surface. this rage is fed by the “silent” depression ravaging the country—in which real weekly wages of all American workers since 1973 have declined nearly 20 percent, while at the same time wealth has been upwardly distributed. p. 4-5

…[A]s of 1989, 1 percent of the population owned 37 percent of the wealth and 10 percent of the population owned 86 percent of the wealth—leading to a profound cynicism and pessimism among the citizenry. p. 6

The neglect of our public infrastructure, for example—our water and sewage systems, bridges, tunnels, highways, subways, and streets—reflects our myopic economic policies, which impede productivity, but also the low priority we place on our common life. p. 6-7

Nihilism is to be understood here not as a philosophic doctrine that there are no rational grounds for legitimate standards or authority; it is, far more, the lived experience of coping with life of horrifying meaninglessness, hopelessness and (most important) lovelessness. The frightening result is a numbing detachment to others and a self-destructive disposition toward the world. Life without meaning, hope and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys both the individual and others. p. 14-5

Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort, convenience, machismo, femininity, violence and sexual stimulation that bombard consumers. These seductive images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward off self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat to black America. p. 17

Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, for example, reveals the devastating effect of pervasive European ideals of beauty on the self-image of young black women. [See Monique Morris’ Pushout.] Morrison’s exposure of the harmful extent to which these white ideals affect the black self-image is a first step toward rejecting these ideals and overcoming the nihilistic self-loathing they engender in blacks. p. 18

Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. But there is always a chance for conversion—a chance for people to believe that there is a hope for the future and a meaning to struggle. This chance rests neither on an agreement about what justice consists of nor of an analysis of how racism, sexism or class subordination operate. Such arguments and analyses are indispensable. But a politics of conversion requires more. Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. 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 for others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion. p. 18-9

[Note. The above should be compared to Dan Harris’ discussion of metta/loving-kindness meditation. See 10% Happier, p. 134-5. I will be posting my notes from Harris’ book later this week.]

The best exemplar of this love is depicted in on a number of levels in Toni Morrison’s great novel Beloved.

The very fact that no black leader could utter publicly that a black appointee for the Supreme Court was unqualified shows how captive they are to white racist stereotypes about black intellectuals talent. p. 23

The undermining and dismantling of the framework of racial reasoning—especially the basic notions of black authenticity, closed-ranks mentality and black cultural conservatism—lead toward a new framework for black thought and practice. This new framework should be a prophetic one of moral reasoning with its fundamental ideas of a mature black identity, coalition strategy and black cultural democracy. Instead of cathartic appeals to black authenticity, a prophetic viewpoint bases mature black self-love and self-respect on the moral quality of black responses to undeniable racist degradation in the American past and present. These responses assume neither a black essence that all black people share nor one black perspective to which all black people should adhere. [Emphasis mine, JH] Rather, a prophetic framework encourages moral assessment of the variety of perspectives held by black people and select those views based on black dignity and decency that eschew putting any group of people or culture on a pedestal or in the gutter. p. 28

How do we account for the absence of the Frederick Douglases, Sojourner Truths, Martin Luther King Jrs., Malcolm Xs and Fannie Lou Hamers in our time? Why hasn’t black America produced intellectuals of the caliber of W.E.B. Du Bois, Anna Cooper, E. Franklin Frazier, Oliver Cox and Ralph Ellison in the past few decades? p. 35

This crude and slightly unfair comparison highlights two distinctive features of black political leaders in the post-Civil Rights ear: the relative absence of authentic anger and the relative absence of genuine humility. What stood out most strikingly about Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer was that they were almost always visibly upset about the condition of black America. p. 38

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure one’s self and mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status. p. 38

Similarly, the reactionary essays (some of which appeared in Reader’s Digest) and Republican Party allegiance of the renowned African-American woman of letters, Zora Neale Hurston, are often overlooked by her contemporary feminist and womanist followers. p. 49

…[T]he pertinent debate regarding black hiring is never on merit, influenced by race-bias against blacks, or on merit, influenced by race-bias, but with special consideration for minorities and women, as mandated by law. In light of actual employment practices, the black conservative rhetoric about race-free hiring criteria (usually coupled with a call for dismantling affirmative action mechanisms) does no more than justify actual practices of racial discrimination. p. 52

The new black conservatives have rightly perceived that the black liberal leadership has not addressed these changes in the economy. Obviously, the idea that racial discrimination is the sole cause of the predicament of the black working poor is specious. And the idea that the courts and government can significantly improve the plight of blacks by enforcing laws already on the books is even more spurious. White racism, though pernicious and potent, cannot fully explain the socioeconomic position of the majority of black Americans. p. 54

Black liberalism indeed is inadequate, but black conservatism is unacceptable. p. 55

They fail to see that the welfare state was an historic compromise between progressive forces seeking broad subsistence rights and conservative forces arguing for unregulated markets. p. 55

The second major area of contention concerns the meaning and practice of Zionism as embodied in the state of Israel. Without a sympathetic understanding of the deep historic sources of Jewish fears and anxieties about group survival, blacks will not grasp the visceral attachment of most Jews to Israel. Similarly, without a candid acknowledgment of blacks’ status as permanent underdogs in American society, Jews will not comprehend what the symbolic predicament and literal plight of the Palestinians in Israel means to blacks. Jews rightly point out that the atrocities of Africa elites on oppressed Africans in Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia are just as bad or worse than those perpetrated on Palestinians by Israel elites. Some also point out—rightly—that deals and treaties between Israel and South Africa are not so radically so different from those between some black Africans, Latin American and Asian countries and South Africa. Still, these and other Jewish charges of black double standards with regard to Israel do not take us to the heart of the matter. Blacks often perceive the Jewish defense of the state of Israel as a second instance of naked group interest, and again, an abandonment of substantive moral deliberation. At the same time, Jews tend to view black critiques of Israel as black rejection of the Jewish right to group survival, and hence a betrayal of the precondition for a black-Jewish alliance. What is at stake here is not simply black-Jewish relations, but more importantly, the moral content of Jewish and black identities and of their political consequences. p. 74

To put it bluntly, if the black freedom struggle becomes simply a power-driven war of all against all that pits xenophobia from below against racism from above, then David Duke’s project is the wave of future—and a racial apocalypse awaits us. p. 75

Malcolm X also recognized, as do too few black leaders today, that the black encounter with the absurd in racist American society yields a profound spiritual need for human affirmation and recognition. Hence, the centrality of religion and music—the most spiritual of human activities—in black life. p. 100

Like Elijah Muhammad (and unlike Malcolm X), Martin Luther King, Jr., concluded that black rage was so destructive and self-destructive that without a broad moral vision and political organization, black rage would wreak havoc on black America. p. 100-1

[T]he enslavement of Africans—over 20 percent of the population—served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. With the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be “white”—they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh and others engaged in class, ethnic and gender struggles over resources and identity. What made America distinctly American for them not simply the presence of unprecedented opportunities, but the struggle for seizing these opportunities in a new land in which black slavery and racial caste served as the floor upon which white class, ethnic and gender struggles could be diffused and diverted. In other words, white poverty could be ignored and whites’ paranoia of each other could be overlooked primarily owing to the distinctive American feature: the basic racial divide of black and white peoples. p. 107-8