Cornel West, an author, scholar and faculty member at Princeton University spoke about race issues in a March 13 Liberal Arts Forum address. Details…
West told the audience in a packed McCrary Theatre that he had come to “say something that unsettles you, unnerves you.” His speech was based on his best-selling book, “Race Matters.”
“Any time you talk about race in America, you’re wrestling with the idea of what it means to be human,” West said. He said the legacy of “244 years of slavery” left African Americans “socially dead … with no legal status and no social standing.” He says our nation needs to “acknowledge that victimization has taken place, does take place.”
“To talk about race in America is to come to grips with death in our past and in our present,” West said. “Who has the courage to think of death in the midst of a sentimental society?” West maintains that Americans are obsessed with comfort, convenience and contentment, and unable to face up to the injustice of racism. “We turn away, we’re addicted to sentimentality, reality is too much.”
West said there has been progress in race relations, “but Malcolm X used to say you don’t stab a man in the back 9 inches and pull it out 3 inches and call that progress.”
West said today’s young people have been socialized in what he calls “the ice age,” where it is “fashionable to be indifferent to other peoples’ suffering.” He talked about poor access to health care, child poverty, dilapidated housing, low-wage jobs and unemployment.
He says the problems are escalating to a lethal combination, with 1 percent of the population owning 48 percent of the financial wealth. “No democracy can survive with vast wealth inequality. It happened under Clinton, both Bushes and Reagan.”
West uses the term “free-market fundamentalism” to refer to what he calls America’s “aggressive materialism, militarism and creeping authoritarianism.” He says “all of America is now a blues people,” hated by much of the world as war looms in Iraq. He warned of changes that could come in U.S. society during war.
“One of the first casualties of war is truth. The second casualty is dissent and the third is rights and liberties.”
West is Class of 1943 University Professor of Religion at Princeton University. He has written extensively about the racial debate in America, including his latest book, “The Cornel West Reader,” where he confronts the “monumental eclipse of hope and the unprecedented collapse of meaning” in American race relations.
He has also written the best-selling “Race Matters,” “Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin,” and “Restoring Hope,” a compilation of interviews with leading African Americans about hope and despair in the black community. West says racial division fosters poverty, paranoia, despair and distrust that undermine the democratic process.
At an early age, West began protesting the status of African Americans by refusing to salute the flag. He was also influenced by the stories of black parishioners in the Baptist church, two generations removed from slavery, who spoke of their religious faith during the most trying times of slavery. West’s interest in the commitment of the Black Panthers also influenced him to advocate for community-based political action.
West has taught at Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Harvard University and Princeton. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, and a master’s degree and doctorate from Princeton.