Markeshia Ricks Photo
West delivers New Haven address.
Cornel West got Black History Month going in New Haven with a challenge for people to love — not a polite kind of love, but the kind that speaks truth to power and makes people uncomfortable during “the bleakest moment” since the 1860s for the civil rights struggle.
The prominent philosopher, activist and intellectual delivered that challenge Saturday in a stirring Black History Month Keynote Lecture at Battell Chapel.
West declared Saturday that “we’re dealing with a spiritual blackout.”
“This is the bleakest moment in this empire since the Civil War,” West proclaimed. “That’s what we’re dealing with here. It is the relative eclipse and collapse of integrity, honesty, decency, and courage across the board.”
His prescribed remedy? Love.
But not the kind of love where we hold hands and say nice things so that nobody’s feelings are hurt. But the kind of love that speaks truth to power. The kind of love that changes the conditions of people who suffer because white supremacy is the status quo; who suffer because patriarchy is the order of the day; and who suffer because of the indifference of those with higher class status, recognized religious affiliation and accepted sexual orientation.
If you’re not talking about love like that, West implied, we’re not ready for the weight and responsibility of Black History Month.
The Coates Factor
West’s Race Matters, 25 years old.
I must confess one of the main reasons I wanted to hear Cornel West’s lecture Saturday was because of an Internet controversy.
I’m sure the organizers had no thought when they invited the former Yale professor to speak that he might spark an Internet feud with reigning public intellectual and MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates just two months before he was scheduled to take the podium at Battell Chapel on a bracingly cold Saturday afternoon.
In case you missed it, West took Coates, whose latest book of essays is about race, the Obama presidency, and the backlash, to task in a column for The Guardian, dubbing him “the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle.”
There is a great tradition among black intellectuals of sparring over what ails America and what must be done to fix it, and of critiquing the critique. But West’s column seemed to veer into an elder chastising his junior. It seemed a baffling personal attack. It left a lot of people, myself included, asking, “What’s going on here?” Even Coates recently said he is still “mystified” by that column.
West has been a leading critic of Obama. His recent criticism of Coates and the subsequent responses went viral, sparking think pieces and a stinging Twitter rebuke from Jelani Cobb, a staff writer for The New Yorker, journalism professor, and friend of Coates. The controversy also coincided with the release of the 25th-anniversary edition of West’s classic Race Matters.
Attendees pack Battell Chapel.
Coates didn’t appear to be on West’s mind when he took us to church and to school Saturday in his address at Battell Chapel. And by the time he stopped talking after nearly an hour, I cared less about the controversy though I think I will still always wish West had stepped to Coates before that column landed.
Coates did briefly come up during the question and answer segment, when a woman helping with the questions from the audience accidentally called West, “Dr. Coates,” causing the room to erupt briefly in chuckles.
“That’s OK,” he said. “I love Brother Coates.”
In fact, love, truth, and justice were central to his message Saturday. So was Black History Month and why a simple celebration of the sanitized version of the toil, struggle, and bloodshed for freedom in this country will never do.
“I first arrived here 34 years ago as a tenured professor, already on fire,” West said. “I met bell hooks. Henry Louis Gates was here. Oh, what a cloud of witnesses we had in the mid-‘80s. That was during the cold callous Reagan years. Some thought it couldn’t get worse. Sookie, sookie, now.”
“I come from a people who have been terrorized for 400 years and have taught the world so much about freedom,” he said. “Fredrick Douglass could have said, ‘We’ll terrorize you back; we’ll enslave you, [but] no, we want freedom for everybody, even the fact we are enslaved.’ That’s a deep tradition to keep alive.
“Ida B. Wells Barnett wrestling with American terrorism, fighting against lynching. Does she want to lynch others? No. She wants freedom for everybody,” he continued. “That’s a tradition that we’re talking about. That’s the prophetic fight back that we need to highlight that’s the best of not just black history or American history. That’s the best of the human spirit y’all.”
On Love
Yale Law student Dianne Lake questions West.
“What is about these black people who keep dishing out these love warriors like that?” he asked of those like Douglass, Wells, and Martin Luther King Jr., who he named as people who loved enough not to meet violence with violence. Who loved enough to try to meet oppression and suppression with justice.
He challenged the crowd to love like that.
“That love ought to be so deep and rich and rooted that the routes of your other love spills over to the vanilla side. It spills over to the reservation of our indigenous, it spills over to the Asian brothers and sisters, it spills over across the board. It spills over those victims of drone strikes in Somalia, Pakistan, Afganistan, and Libya. It spills over in Honduras, to Mexico. That precious baby in Tel Aviv should be elevated in the same way that the precious baby in Gaza and the West Bank.”
“Love forces us to take off the mask,” he said.
“Gangsta” Trump
West said President Trump is the manifestation of the current spiritual blackout in America but he didn’t cause it.
“Yes, we can begin with Trump, but he is a sign and a symptom. He’s not the cause. He is as American as cherry pie. He is as American as apple pie. And yes he’s a gangster — no doubt about that. Let’s be clear. And when I say gangster that’s not a subjective expression; that’s an objective condition. When you talk about grabbing a woman’s private parts, that’s gangster.
“When you see oil in another country and want to take it, that’s gangster. White supremacist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic across the board. But when we call him a gangster, that’s not just name calling and finger pointing. See I was a gangster before I met Jesus, and now I’m a redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.”
“Trump is a whole lot more gangster than me,” he said drawing laughs. “I want y’all to know that.”
On Obama
While his critique of Trump was strong, West didn’t back away from his previous critiques of Obama Saturday.
“Do we have what it takes to be unflinchingly candid about the reality that we face? We had this challenge with Brother Obama. I got into a lot of trouble. Oh, I got into a lot of trouble with Brother Obama. I love the brother but I’m a Christian and so I try to love everybody. That symbolic breakthrough was magnificent. His brilliance undeniable. And my God, the juxtaposition between Obama and Trump is really quite telling, isn’t it? Unbelievable.
“You’ve got to keep in mind, Obama was the brilliant, poised black face of the American empire. Trump is the know-nothing, narcissistic face of the American empire. It’s still an empire. It’s still an empire.
“That’s why when Brother Barack met with the Wall Street folk in March 2009, two months into his administration, he said, ‘I stand between you and the pitchforks, but I want you to know that I’m on your side. I will protect you.’
“How many Wall Street executives went to jail given all the crimes that took place — insider trading, market manipulation, fraudulent activity, predatory lending especially in poor working people?” he asked. “How many Wall Street executives went to jail? But let some poor brother or sister get caught with a crack bag — going straight to jail.”
The Whole Truth And Nothing But The Funk
West reminded the audience that every generation of truthteller caught hell. They couldn’t be comfortable with the trappings of mainstream success if they wanted to do the work necessary for the struggle for freedom and ultimately be truly great, he said.
“Anytime you are in a quest for truth that refuses to be truthful about itself, you can rest assured that you’re still captive to some form of mendacity. And there is an intimate relationship between mendacity and criminality. ‘Cause it usually aligns with a hiding and concealing of crimes against humanity.
“At this very moment, one out of two children black and brown under six years old live under poverty in the richest nation in the world. I consider that a crime against humanity.
“The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak,” he said. “If suffering is not heard somebody is lying.”
“That’s what the struggle for black freedom is about. Not to settle for deodorized discourse. But to keep it funky. Because that is what truth is about. The great Samuel Beckett called it the mess. Bootsy and George Clinton called it “the funk.”
“It had to do with our humanity. The featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creature born between urine and feces. Yeah, it’s funky down there. Everybody emerges in that blood. And on the way to the culinary delight of terrestrial worlds if you think somehow you can get out of space and time, what Franz Kafka called a prison sentence in space and time, get off the crack pipe.
“The question becomes what are you going to do in the short time between your mama’s womb and the tomb?”
Put The Pipe Down
“It is one thing to talk about Black History Month and trot out all the great figures of the pantheon but we don’t like to be truthful about what it was like when they were alive.
“Everybody loves Martin Luther King Jr. now that the world’s had his body for 50 years. But oh when he died, 55 percent of black people disapproved of King and 72 percent of white people disapproved of King. How can that be Brother West? Every black person loved King. Get off the crack pipe.”
Click on the Facebook live video below to catch West’s address in its entirety.
I so appreciated the live-streaming. I couldn't get over to Battell, so I listened in my car on my smart phone! Oh the conveniences of modern technology. Although, having my copy of Race Matters signed a second time, 25 years later was appealing.
Am I still salty with Cornell and Tavis about their 8 year crusade against President Obama? Yup, I am. But I have been an admirer of Brother West for many many years and his love of jazz gives me reason to forgive on that strength alone. I remember when Race Matters dropped onto the scene... Many of us who fancied ourselves budding Black Intellectuals carrying our copies with us everywhere, ready to have discussion about race in America. All the hours spent at Black Print Heritage Gallery with Bea Dozier Taylor waxing poetic about where we were as a people.
Brother West knows how to stir us and gives us pause about where we are socially. He is right about love and Black History Month. I find myself ready on both.
Man, Black History Month has been LIT! And it's only day 5!