I have never taken one of Cornel West’s classes or read any of his books. I know him entirely through his frequent appearances on television, where he comes off as extremely funny, insightful in an original way, and maybe just a touch crazy. He has an infectious smile and a joyful, playful manner. It’s hard not take an instant liking to him, and that’s also why it’s easy to gloss over and forgive some of the nuttier things that he says. When it comes to criticizing Obama’s policies, he’s not much different from Jane Hamsher. But when West starts to question the president’s genuine blackness, Jonathan Capehart is right; West is no better than Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich.
The irony is that West has adopted a self-consciously anti-colonial viewpoint that probably jibes quite well with the viewpoint of Obama’s father. In other words, Newt Gingrich criticized the president for having a post-colonial Kenyan point of view and West is criticizing him for not having a post-colonial view. Maybe both West and Trump are behaving like idiots?
West seems to think that the genuinely black point of view is to be opposed to U.S. foreign policy in the Third World. He seems to insist that American blacks show solidarity first with black and brown people around the globe, and only later (if there is any solidarity left over) with their own countrymen. I think West is out of line. It’s fine to be critical of U.S. foreign policy and supportive of people who resist and oppose policies of ours that they find harmful. But to insist that this basically anti-American disposition is a requirement for true blackness is oppressive and unjustified.
Maybe West should consider what it means to be the president of the United States and be basically opposed to U.S. foreign policy at the same time. Changing the arc of our country’s foreign policy isn’t something that can be done overnight.
I could argue with West’s other points about the banks and Wall Street, but I don’t care that West sees no merit in the stabilization of financial markets, or the saving of the auto industry. Plenty of progressive people of all races feel the same way that West feels. That’s a political disagreement (although, one I find increasingly boring). What disturbs me is that West calls the president “deracinated” and contrasts him with “an independent black brother.”
West has valuable things to say and some valid critiques of the president and his team. But he does himself no credit by assigning himself as the referee of authentic blackness. And, maybe he should take it less personally that the president doesn’t return his phone calls.
#1-West is just another media-created celebrity…a member of the Quasi-Intellectual Division. He’s got a rap and he makes some money off of it. Just another talking head. Yes, he teaches at Princeton. So what? Didja follow the recent Princeton bullshit that resulted in the suicide of one of their professors recently? Princeton is no better than the rest of American academia, which is to say that except for its power and money it ain’t worth shit. As Henry Kissinger…not my most preferred source of wisdom, but when you’re right, you’re right…is reputed to have said regarding academe and the hustle involved therein:
West got out of the smalltime academic scene and into the bigtime media hustle because he wanted more. So did Kissinger. And they both got it, too. But West is still just another gabbling talking head, Princeton or no.
As I have been saying mre and more in recent months…if it’s being hyped in the media, it’s false.
#2-That said…Obama is not culturally part of the mainstream black experience in the U.S. Not anymore he isn’t.
“Deracinated?”
Hmmmm…
Obama?
Yup.
He still bears wounds from growing up black in America (How could he not?) but his own reaction to that position and his great personal gifts led him up and out of that nasty situation, into the lofty heights of vast wealth and power where it doesn’t much matter of what race or religion you may be as long as you are…in the Mafia sense of the word, bet on it…a “good earner.”
Which he most certainly is.
And West’s remarks are right on the money.
“Deracinated?”
Bet on that as well.
Were he “racinated” instead, do you really think the corporate powers would have elevated him the the presidency?
Please.
West?
Even a stopped clock tells the right time once in a while.
Turn your damned TV off, Booman. It’s poison.
My sig?
You cannot dissolve the (totally artificial) union between yourself and the State until you turn off the media at least long enough to clear your system of its all-pervasive lies. Cornel West and Barack Obama are both part of that system. You need an extended media fast to clean out the impacted intellectual and emotional shit that you have built up through decades of media consumption. You really do. So do us all.
Try it…three weeks out of the news cycle.
You be bettah off.
Try it.
I dare ya.
AG
One thing that bothers me is the idea that the president hasn’t earned the right to be authentically black because:
a) his ancestors were not slaves.
b) he didn’t grow up in the hood.
c) he had opportunities most blacks lack
d) he’s more comfortable hanging out with Jews like Rahm and Ax than authentic brothers like Cornel West.
All of this type of analysis is pretty close to straight-up bullshit.
It’s not like Kenyans are unfamiliar with European oppression. Obama was raised by a single-mother and his grandparents, which is, unfortunately, all too common in the hood. His opportunities were earned. And, if you’ll forgive me the phrase, Obama has plenty of black friends.
While Obama has certain traits that made it easier for him to rise than the average black man, he also had additional burdens.
He’s bi-racial, which is still threatening to a lot of blacks and whites alike. He has a Muslim sounding name and had to get elected in the midst of the War on Terror. I bet his job would have been easier if his name was Cornel Ronald West. He comes from a state most people have never been to that is thousands of miles away from the mainland and only became a state a few years before he was born. If he was born in Chicago, like his wife, we wouldn’t be having this controversy over his citizenship.
That he overcame all of these things should be respected, not used to drive a false wedge between him and the black community.
I’m tired of it. What’s ironic is how smart and reasonable Al Sharpton sounds in comparison to West. It’s like West believed Gingrich’s caricature of Obama.
It’s a cultural thing, Booman. Not a racial one. Let’s take it out of the “black” area for a moment, shall we? Imagine an American with a great deal of Italian or Irish ancestry who grew up almost entirely separated from the fairly well-functioning urban/suburban working class Irish-American or Italian-American societies of the ’50s and ’60s. He read about them and he got some static as he grew up because he had an ethnically-specific name and maybe looked a little different from the people where he was being raised, but culturally speaking he did not grow up in the midst of those very specific cultures.
So later on he checks them out. He tries to assume some of their characteristics in an attempt to figure out who he really is. Maybe he admires the familial closeness of the Italian culture or the way that the Irish fight and read. He identifies. He sees the problems that being working class Irish or Italian can cause and he actually gets involved in helping people stuck in those cultures.
But they never really accept him. Harvard meets Scorsese’s Mean Streets? Not really. And eventually he goes back to his real cultural roots…pretty much intellectual, upward-striving middle class, in Obama’s case. He becomes fabulously successful and damned powerful in the process.
But his weak street creds are forever lost as result.
Is it a good trade?
It is for him. Bet on it. But the street-raised intellectuals? The academic revolutionaries? The talking head so-called “thinkers?” For them, he’s some kind of sellout.
If they have a good vocabulary they use words like “deracinated” to describe what they do not like about him. But it’s really just jealousy. They envy his luck, his talent and most of all his power. It is he who does not answer their calls, not the other way around. And they potshot at him, in true “Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small” fashion.
How much real weight in the system does Cornel West pull? Past his little forays on the Bill Maher show or whatever other media playgrounds he frequents.
In street terms?
Obama is a boss and he ain’t shit.
Fuggedaboudit.
AG
BTW, just a small correction. The source of the quotation”Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small” is not Henry Kissinger, but a Columbia political scientist named Wallace Sayre.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law
Yeah.
I know,.
That’s why I said “As Henry Kissinger….is reputed to have said…”
The early bird gets the worm.
And the dedicated parasite gets the quote.
So it goes…
AG
Regarding West’s own personal shit, to me that just shows his critiques of Obama and power ring somewhat hollow. Why would he be so hurt that Obama didn’t return his calls if not for his own ego and need to be respected himself? Clearly West craves power just as much.
See Melissa Harris-Perry, too:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/160725/cornel-west-v-barack-obama
He has a personal history with Larry Summers, too, which definitely colored his view of the administration early on.
What a hassle to actually MAKE changes to the system, however small, rather than TALKING ABOUT everything that’s wrong and taking potshots from the sidelines. And trust me, as a veteran of 25 years of it, academia IS the sidelines and it’s teeming with self-promoting blowhards like West.
Whatever one thinks about Obama’s limitations, he is all that stands between us and a starved beast relic of a government. There is such a thing as constructive criticism and loud, principled dissent, yes, but I’m constantly dismayed by the whiny, willfully blind, Obama=Bush line of thinking. These are extremely consequential times, and any hope we have about where this country is going over the next several decades hinges on the 2012 election.
Basically, the whiners, left and right, are vulgar Platonists. They judge everything by theoretical ideals that do not and never could exist on earth. This is attractive to a certain type of academic because it sets up an extremely simple, ready-made structure yielding unlimited material for criticism of anyone or anything, anywhere, any time.
Booman, I think there are some things you’re missing in West’s comments. He is not questioning Obama’s Blackness. What he is doing is talking about how it can be very difficult for a Black man or woman in the United States who is not socialized in a largely Black environment. One learns late that one is not accepted as an equal in white society, but doesn’t have the experience of having the community to support one through that. One is plagued by the feeling that one doesn’t really fit in anywhere. One always sticks out whomever one is with.
When West says deracinated he means separated from the community, not that he isn’t Black. You get called certain names in earnest once in this country, and you’re officially Black.
Obama made a lot of choices in his life to find himself in the community. His wife is the best example, but there’s also his church. I think he found quickly that he would have to leave most of that behind as President with the Wright controversy, so-called. Nothing Wright said was controversial to me or unheard of in any Black community–not that he wouldn’t provoke disagreement in the Black community, which has as diverse an array of opinions as any and more than most, I’d think–but it didn’t play in Peoria.
The comment about Obama hanging out with Jews was poorly put, to say the least. I took it that Obama sought people who knew what it was like to take s#*t socially. Larry Summers knows what it feels like to be called a dirty kike, even if he probably doesn’t get called such often these days. Obama’s favorite quality in an adviser is competence as well, hence he surrounds himself with technocrats who, by their nature as such, seek to maintain the status quo rather than change it.
West is also a very serious writer who happened to break out so to speak of the ivory tower and become a public intellectual. His writings are more of a popular sort these days but that doesn’t mean they aren’t serious. Remember that he finds Jesus in Marx and vice versa–not at all hard to do if one pays attention to the texts–and it’s easy to see why he would break publicly with Obama.
I agree with most of what you’re saying, but West really is attacking his blackness.
I don’t see how you can read that any other way.
Well, I base what I say on what I have learned from other people, my wife primarily, who is Black with a white mother, grew up in a Mexican neighborhood, white prep school and university educated. She is emphatically Black, but also talks about being deracinated. She has told me that racist tropes come up in her mind sometimes, particularly when she sees Black people whose public behavior fits the racist image, like when we take the bus and there are some poorly behaved high school girls on the back seat. She says these ideas that pop in her head really make her feel hatred toward herself. She needs to fight both but it is very hard, and it is also, as West says, very understandable.
Please understand that West shouldn’t be uncritically defended in this instance but rather that I think he’s making a point that is not false about the phenomenon. How thoroughly it applies to Obama is another matter, and you can accuse me of reading West generously–that I would listen to.
I do. It’s in your quote: rootlessness = deracination = separation from one’s community.
What West knows as well as anyone is that race, especially in this country, is a social construct. It’s not who you are; it’s how others see you. That’s why we refers to Obama as black, rather that white (which is equally true) or biracial (which is actually accurate). West wouldn’t argue that Obama isn’t authentically black, because he knows perfectly well that’s not Obama’s call. (Except in the sense that Obama’s is not what we consider a typical black American experience, which is unquestionably true.)
What he’s arguing is that Obama isn’t a free black, and that’s where I have big problems. Just for starters, it seems to me that West is arguing that you’re only free if you subscribe to a certain way of thinking (which West, of course, shares), which is very close to Orwellian. I find a lot of West to be genuinely valuable – precisely because nobody else with his kind of media access says it, and his is often a viewpoint that’s desperately needed in our ossified Village circles. And I agree with a lot of his policy critiques of Obama. But I find psychoanalysis of public figures, based solely on their public actions, tiresome and pointless to start with, and these are particularly loaded and problematic.
And, as politicians, pundits, and good post-modernists like West all know, what you say isn’t nearly as important as what people hear. If people hearWest saying Obama isn’t really black – and they will and are, even if that’s not what he intended – that’s on West. He should know better.
James Brown said, “Say it loud; I’m black and I’m proud.”
It seems to me that Cornel West has embraced that attitude whole-heartedly. And that’s great. That’s a healthy attitude. But you can’t take that attitude of embracing your blackness, celebrating it, talking about it all the time, and then turn around and say that your blackness is wholly imposed on you.
What I think you are saying is that West embraces his blackness but the alternative doesn’t exist, which would be for him to somehow negate his blackness. His choice is not to say he’s not black, but to say he’s not proud.
But look at how he’s applying this to Obama. He’s saying Obama may be black but he isn’t a “brother.” He’s saying that Obama is afraid of brothers. He’s saying he’s more comfortable around Jews that real “free” black men.
I mean, c’mon. That’s setting himself up as the judge of authentic blackness, and it’s completely uncalled for.
BooMan, you say
When West said
He’s saying is that Obama is a brother who because of his upbringing has baggage. You can say West is wrong, but he’s saying Obama is a brother. West is being inclusive: you may not feel like a brother, but you are a brother.
Maybe West is being disingenous, because he’s really pissed off at Obama, calling him brother before he tries to knife him, spiritually–and this is spiritual because it cuts to one’s spirit. I don’t know.
Okay, fine, he called him his brother. But what he gives with one hand he takes away with the other. If Obama were a real true free black brother, he would have to be afraid of himself. That conclusion is implicit and inescapable in West’s logic. He’s clearly saying that Obama is not authentically black. He’s saying that he’s afraid of authentically black people and doesn’t prefer them as friends.
What did I say? I didn’t say West might not some point about Obama’s relationship to the average black person in this country. I said West was setting himself up as the referee of black authenticity, and that he’s got no right to do that.
Well, I appreciate you always because you actually consider what people say even when they disagree with you. I think even especially when they disagree with you. I’ll do the same: you’re absolutely right that West has no right to make himself the arbiter of other people’s experience of Blackness. It’s such a typical prof thing to do to assume one can, and that one’s shit doesn’t stink. West has got to examine this in himself, but self-reflection is not most profs’ strong suit.
Also, too, in that same paragraph, West refers to white people as brothers. So, calling Obama “his brother” doesn’t mean ” his black brother.”
The question of Obama’s blackness or lack of same is an intellectual problem for certain cultural theorists who formulate or try to formulate the meaning of blackness. Obama is the president of the United States, not the president of blackness – as if there were or could be such a thing. So maybe West is right in a way, but why that should seem problematic is what I’m questioning. West seems to think that a truly “black” president should actualize the presidency as the apotheosis of blackness, and if he does not, something’s wrong. I find this POV insufferably smug.
But it’s even more complicated, because the range of views and attitudes within the American black community is vastly more diverse than West’s particular academic version of it.
Well, I think that to West you can’t be free without taking a critical stance toward capitalism.
No. West is definitely questioning Obama’s blackness. He complained about who Obama hangs with (Jewish Whites) and complains that Obama doesn’t return his calls (a black man) and never misses the opportunity to say Obama hasn’t done anything for black people – which is total bullshit. All of it is to imply that Obama doesn’t like black people and is not black enough. I have seen many versions of West’s comments applied to other successful blacks. His partner in crime, Tavis Smiley, engages in this bullshit also.
I’m tired of these so-called black leaders setting the guidelines for what it means to be black. It plays right into the lie that we are all the same.
Thank you for addressing this. This whole episode and his statements are just absurd and infuriating.
West has had hostility toward Obama since Obama started to get name recognition on the national stage. It is to be expected that someone who makes it and does that well will be resented by a lot of people. West is attacking Obama on the points he can attack. Not black enough? Go for it, West.
Dick Gregory spoke about this in La in 2008. He was great.
Michelle Obama talked about some of her friends telling her she was trying to be white by getting the positions she got when she went to work.
i don’t need a white guy who lives in the burbs to tell me what black people are an aren’t allowed to say about other black people.
And I don’t need some Negro who can’t seem to find a period at the end of sentence or write anything vaguely coherent lecturing me about my support of the President. He’s a pseudo intellectual who has demonstrated as much intellect as every black dude I’ve met who joined the Nation of Islam in prison and memorized a few big words to impress gullible white liberals. He’s a fuckin’ fraud like many other blacker than thou so-called intellectuals who’ve milked white liberal guilt into prominent, well paying positions at an Ivey League schools and only sets foot on the campuses of historically black colleges and universities to sell their bull shit books. He’s down with po’ black and brown folks, but from an elevated position in the talented tenth.
kind of a cheap shot in my opinion.
My, what I have forfeited by moving out of the city!
I was waiting for somebody to say that. I call bullshit.
the Black community has always been multiracial in America.
Ever since Massa first tip-toed down to the slave quarters.
we didn’t invent the one-drop rule, but found a way, as with everything done to Black people in America, to just thrive ‘ in spite of’. we don’t throw away people. not even folks that we should (OJ, Pookey, Junebug in the joint), because we are the community that believes in redemption.
All of us have ‘ family’ that was just ‘ picked up along the way’. You know what I mean, you don’t even know when this person became a part of family gatherings, they just did. In my grandmother’s house in Mississippi, there were two men from the community, Mr. Jim and Mr. Sam – they came for breakfast and dinner every day for over 50 years, until my last aunt passed away a few years ago. I don’t know how it started, but they were part of the family.
When we were visiting, if they didn’t show up at breakfast, then the ` younguns’ would have to take a plate to their houses…the plates got us in the door, and then we were supposed to get the rest of the story. Did they look well? Did they just look under the weather, or should my Aunts call the doctor for them? Because, that’s what `family’ does.
My Aunt who lived next door to us would have family dinner every Wednesday. By the time I got home from school, I would go, and there would be a revolving cast of family and family friends that would show up every week.
We just buried one of my ` Aunts’ this past week. She was my biological Aunt’s best friend. They met on the way to college over 65 years ago, and have been friends ever since. They were friends longer than I’ve been alive, yet, I literally can’t remember a time when she wasn’t at a family event. When I heard she had passed away after a brief illness, it hit in the gut the way the loss of `family’ can.
We’ve had family reunions every year since 1977. A full third of the folks that come aren’t blood related to us, but they are ‘ family’. Black folks just don’t throw anyone away. If you show that you are willing to be a positive member of the general community, then that’s enough for us. You’ll find your place at the table.
Throw away Barack Obama?
then, let’s throw away Booker T, Frederick D, W.E.B., late head of the NAACP Walter White, Adam Clayton Powell, ……name a famous Black person, and baby, I’ll find the White folks in their family tree.
Barack Obama not know he’s Black?
As the late millionaire Percy Sutton said:
if you wake up in the morning and forget that you’re Black, by 5pm someone would have reminded you.
As someone who has stood her ground in defining my own Black, which included loves of classical, country music, ice skating, tennis and golf (long before Serena, Venus and Tiger), who traveled to so much of this country where the only Black people they saw were on tv or in the movies…. I give Black folks a lot of leeway to define their Blackness. Only type of Black folk that pluck the nerves are the self-hating ones, and even then, I just sigh and hope that they will see the light. I only get angry with them when they get in positions that they can hurt other Black folk due to their own self-hatred (Unca Clarence, this means you)
There’s nothing wrong with being Black. The only thing wrong is that folks define Black with nothing but negativity. …and I get so much strength from being Black….I can’t see being anything else.
This. Thank-you, rikyrah.
Beautifully said.