Question

What case does Cornell West make for economic justice? What are his proposals? How reasonable are they?

Answer 1

In November 2007, Cornel West got onstage at the Apollo Theater in Harlem and before a hollering crowd of more than a thousand people, with much arm-­waving and wrist-flapping, along with a certain amount of ass-wagging, introduced his candidate for president of the United States—“my brother, my companion, and my comrade”—Barack Obama. “He’s an eloquent brother,” preached West. “He’s a good brother, he’s a decent brother.” Obama returned the sloppy kiss and pronounced West “an oracle.”

That compliment could not have been more apt, for West regards himself as a prophet more than a professor. He believes that he is called to teach God’s justice to a heedless nation. “There is a price to pay for speaking the truth,” reads the signature on e-mails coming from West’s office. “There is a bigger price for living a lie.” So when his view of the commander-in-chief changed from adoration to disappointment, West was moved to proclaim it out loud. He had already been lobbing rhetorical grenades in the direction of the Oval Office, calling the president “spineless” for his failure to make poor and working people a policy priority and “milquetoast” for kowtowing to corporate interests during the economic crisis. But in an interview with Truthdig, ­published last May, West went nuclear. He called Obama “the black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” And then he said he wanted to “slap him,” as the article put it, “on the side of his head.”

In the white world of mainstream media, the interview made a few headlines. But in precincts of the left, and among certain African-American scholars, it unleashed a tide of anguish. West has been an intellectual celebrity for three decades, protected and cherished by his like-minded comrades, but the nasty tone of his Truthdig comments caused many of his closest colleagues to question their devotion, to suspect his motives, and to wonder whether West’s prominence had finally exceeded his merit. Their concerns were in part pragmatic: As the 2012 election approached, some thought West might make his case better if he weren’t quite so mean.

“When you say you want to slap the president upside the head, black people don’t cotton too easily to that,” says Michael Eric Dyson, who is a sociologist at Georgetown University and considers West a mentor (they studied together at Princeton). “Black people hear echoes of the assault on the body. Lynching. Castration.” The word slap, he says, “that’s violence.” Dyson says he has privately tried—and failed—to urge West toward a more moderate discourse.

The first time I traveled to Princeton University to meet with West, I heard him before I saw him; his familiar, gravelly, elongated vowels—“Definite-leeee”—reached me as I waited by his office door. Once inside, I offered the argument I’d heard: that his assault on the president hurts poor and working people more than it helps them. By seeding the left with dissatisfaction, West risks suppressing that vote and jeopardizing the outcome of November’s election. Whatever his failings, this reasoning goes, Obama is bound to represent poor people better than Mitt Romney would.

West considered the objection for the smallest fraction of a second before casting it, witheringly, aside. What, he asked me, leaning across his desk and jabbing his long fingers downward, if the Jews had asked Amos to tone it down a notch? “ ‘Well, Amos,’ ” West imagines the residents of the Kingdom of Judah, circa 750 B.C., saying in a sort of whiny white-­person voice, “Don’t talk about justice within the Jewish context, because that’s going to make Jewish people look bad.’

West has said that his Christian beliefs form the most fundamental part of who he is. Earlier, I asked him which of Jesus’ ­disciples he most emulates. “Disciples?” he responded in a soft voice. “None of them, really. Nah. ’Cause I want to be like Jesus, I don’t want to be like those disciples.”

This summer, West will leave Princeton, where he’s happily worked for a decade, to join the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in New York City. By conventional standards, this is a nutty career move. Princeton, with an endowment of $17 billion, trains the future’s titans in the rigors of rational thought. Union, whose financial health is not nearly so robust, trains future ministers to apply the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a broken world. But in 1977, West, who was then working on his philosophy Ph.D. at ­Princeton, started teaching at Union, and it was there that he first found himself, at 24, surrounded and supported by a cohort of black, Christian intellectuals who hoped, as he did, to change the world. West produced his most important work—Prophesy Deliverance!—at Union. It was a battle cry, an argument for including the literature and art, the joy and the suffering, of American blacks in the Western canon alongside Plato and Dante and Chekhov.

“Oh, it’s time to go home,” said West, explaining his move. “It’s about that time in your life where you begin to assess, what do you want the last stage to be in terms of your work and your witness. I have lived the most blessed of lives in the academy. Eight years at Union, three years when I first tenured at Yale, six years at Princeton, eight years at Harvard, back to Princeton ten years. It’s time to end that last stage where I started. Union is the institutional expression of my own prophetic Christian identity, and that identity is deeper than any identity I have.”

What West doesn’t say is that for the past decade, he has been wandering in an emotional and spiritual wilderness. At 58 years old, he has let old wounds fester. He nurses a personal beef with Obama, and he still smarts from the bruises inflicted upon his ego in a 2001 fracas with Larry Summers, in which the then-president of Harvard University queried West’s scholarly bona fides in public and West departed Cambridge in a red-hot rage for his second stint at Princeton. (“[Summers] needed to be the president of Harvard the way I need to be the president of the NHL,” he told me.) West is also a cancer survivor, having been diagnosed and treated for late-stage prostate disease just as the Summers debacle was unfolding. He is thrice-divorced and still pays alimony to his last ex-wife.

In addition, West supports a young daughter named Zeytun, who lives in Germany. Zeytun was born in 2000, the result of a “love relationship,” as he calls it, with a Kurdish journalist who was at ­Harvard on a Nieman Fellowship. West visits Zeytun every six weeks, he says. He calls her every day, and keeps a lock of her hair, tied with a faded ribbon, in his wallet. (West also has a son from his first marriage and a 16-year-old grandson.)

West talks a lot about love, but he doesn’t have many close friends. Rabbi Michael ­Lerner, the founder of Tikkun magazine, worked with West on a book in 1995. “Cornel is a very lonely person,” he told Rolling Stone magazine several years ago. “For a long time, I thought I was his best friend … But he had probably about 1,000 best friends. He was best friends with everybody. That made him more isolated.” West’s inner circle consists of three people: his mother, Irene, who is 80 (his father is deceased); his older brother, Clifton; and the media entrepreneur Tavis Smiley, who is also his business manager and de facto publicist. Smiley talks to West almost every day; he publishes his books; he keeps in close touch with West’s mother. When West wore out his shoes on a trip to New Orleans, Smiley bought him a new pair of Cole Haans. “He is the older brother I never had, and I am the younger brother he never had,” says Smiley. “There is nothing I enjoy more than sitting at his feet, listening, and laughing on him because I love him so deeply.”

The friendship with Smiley has exponentially increased West’s visibility. West has always done more than 100 lectures a year and has long been a regular on cable news and Bill Maher’s show. Now he co-hosts a weekly public-radio show with Smiley, and over the past month the two men have been touring the country promoting their new book, The Rich and the Rest of Us, which they call a “poverty manifesto.” With Smiley’s help, West is flogging the book through his 350,000 Twitter followers. West, a technophobe, “doesn’t punch the button,” Smiley told me. “He quotes his tweets” to a graduate student Smiley knows at the University of Southern California, who posts them on the live feed. “But Doc says push the send button more than I do.”

People who have known West for decades believe the alliance with Smiley plays to West’s greatest flaw: his hunger for adulation. (In interviews, more than one person compared West to a precocious child, clamoring to be seen. “Look at me! Look at me!”) These friends hope the move to Union will help him get back to the purity of purpose that marked earlier phases of his career. West “needs to be part of a community, not part of a couple,” says one. “You can’t separate [Smiley and West]. There’s no public separation where one begins and one ends.”

I asked West whether he believed Union would finally give him something like the quiet fulfillment his marital life has so far failed to provide. “Last month I did seventeen lectures,” he conceded. “That’s too much for a brother almost 60 years old. At the same time, if I’m able to touch a whole lot of lives and get them to rethink, organize, mobilize, is that better than sitting in the library and writing a magnum opus twelve years from now? That’s an open question. That’s an open question, it really is.”

West and Cone did a Q&A at a Princeton bookstore last winter, and afterward, they and a handful of friends and colleagues—including the journalist Chris Hedges, who wrote the Truthdig piece; Carl Dix, a local communist organizer; Brother Ali, an albino rapper; and a few professors—went to dinner. There, West was in his element. He had no one to provoke, and it was clear to see why some might compare West to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W.E.B. DuBois, or even Mark Twain. The conversation started with an appreciation of the works of novelist James Baldwin. “At Baldwin’s funeral,” said West, “I sat next to Stokely Carmichael. He’s a hard brother, and he cried like a baby.” West regarded Baldwin in the light of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Amiri Baraka, and his friend Toni Morrison. Then the conversation took a turn, touching briefly on the works of the slavery historians ­David Brion Davis and Leon Litwack, and the civil-rights historian Howard Zinn, ­before resting for a time on Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, the definers of ­twentieth-century Christian theology—both of whom taught at Union. About the literary critic Harold Bloom, West pronounced, “He’s not always right, but he’s always got something to say,” and then he veered straight through Martin Heidegger to praise his lesser-known disciple, Hans-Georg Gadamer.

In 1993, with Race Matters, West established himself beyond the academy. Race Matters was a collection of essays directed at a mainstream audience that chided America for having failed to offer anything like a prospect of success or fulfillment to its citizens of African descent. “We have created rootless, dangling people with little link to the supportive networks—family, friends, and school—that sustain some sense of purpose in life,” he wrote. “Postmodern culture is more and more a market culture dominated by gangster mentalities and self-destructive wantonness.” At the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the volume for its “ferocious moral vision and astute intellect.” The next year, after a long courtship, Henry Louis Gates Jr. lured West away from Princeton to Harvard, where he was building a first-rate African-American-studies department. The hire was widely seen as a coup for Gates and for Harvard, and West became the forward of what Gates called his “dream team.” West, long a cult figure on campus, was famous.

Fame begat more fame. After Race Matters, West produced about a dozen books, half of them written with someone else. He appeared in two movies in The Matrix series; he made three hip-hop/spoken-word albums; he gained a reputation as “C-span Man”; and he worked on the political campaigns of Al Sharpton, Bill Bradley, and Ralph Nader. In 2004, he published ­Democracy Matters, which hit No. 11 on the Times’ best-seller list. As his popularity grew, so too did the number of critics calling West shallow and self-serving. Kirkus ­Reviews called the book “a sermon written in a hurry and delivered to the choir.”

In 2006, West fired his speaker’s bureau and put Smiley in charge. Smiley says his involvement in West’s career is for West’s own good, because West is too prone to donate his talents for free. “As his friend, I have to protect him and his earning potential,” says Smiley. “I am considerably younger than Dr. West, and at some point, someone’s got to take care of Zeytun, his daughter. I help him with his finances, my accountants are his accountants, my lawyers are his lawyers.” When West speaks in public, he now earns as much as $25,000, and his travel schedule is bruising. He’s on the road four days out of seven and boasts that in ten years at Princeton, he’s never spent a weekend at home. His last three books have been published by Smiley’s publishing house, and he got an assist on his 2009 memoir from Smiley’s ghost writer David Ritz.

West’s media exposure, together with his brutal attacks on the president and others, “has cumulatively led to the perception that he’s squandered his gift and his birthright,” says Dyson. “West has sadly exchanged the unsexy tedium of sustained scholarship to the siren call of public gestures.”

West shrugs off the criticism that he’s failed to live up to his intellectual promise. “As much as I love the life of the mind, I do not give primary status to intellect,” he told me. “I give much more to the centrality of love, and much more to where that love comes from—and that is family, faith, friends, and music. That is fundamentally who I am. Smartness is not some kind of value that I put a whole lot of weight on. There are smart Nazis and smart xenophobes and smart patriarchs and so forth.”

One of West’s most defining characteristics is a near-total lack of interest in his own psychological archaeology. “I’ve never taken the time to focus on the inner dynamics of the dark precincts of my soul. Like St. Augustine once said, I’m a mystery to myself,” West wrote in his autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Even when pressed, he refuses to engage in self-analysis, protesting that 21st-century confessional narcissism isn’t his thing. The result is a distance, sometimes very wide, between what West says and what he does, without any anxiety from West himself that such inconsistency might diminish his credibility. He preaches humility, but Brother West reads like a catalogue of encounters with the famous and fabulous, among them Sean Combs, Kathleen Battle (whom West dated), Jerome Groopman, Carly Simon, Johnnie Cochran, Luther Vandross, and Sarah Vaughan. “How well does he know himself in the shadow places?” muses his friend Reverend James Forbes, who after eighteen years as senior minister of Riverside Church is also returning to Union this year. “The intellectual gifts become a kind of armor to self-disclosure.”

As a leftist activist, West opposes sexism and patriarchy. As a student of American culture, he has been an advocate of marriage and, especially, of two-parent families. “Liberals are … destroying the parental role,” he wrote in The War Against Parents, co-authored in 1998 with Sylvia Ann Hewlett. “Many on the left fail to understand that we need to rein in untrammeled individualism if we are to re-create the values that nurture family life.” Yet Cornel West is no traditional family man. The protagonist of Brother West seems a puppyish and self-important nerd who chases women until he wears them down and conquers them. (“Marry me,” he begged the woman who became his last wife, “and become the First Lady of Black America.”) Then, when the realities of mundane domesticity set in, he leaves. His third marriage fell apart around the time Zeytun was born, and in the memoir West complains, with very little empathy toward the injured parties, about the legal and ­financial squeeze he felt from both his ex-wife and Zeytun’s mother. “How blue,” he wrote, “can a brother get?”

West says he abhors racism and nationalism, yet in a public spat that made headlines in 1999, he refused to concur with Michael Lerner that Louis Farrakhan’s anti-­Semitic views made him “a racist dog,” preferring instead to call him “a xenophobic spokesperson when it comes to dealing with Jewish humanity.” West hates what he would call corporate oligarchs, yet Tavis Smiley’s talk show is underwritten by Wal-Mart, infamous for allegations of discriminatory and unfair labor practices, and West has never raised an objection. I asked him about this, and he offered a boilerplate response: “We have to stand on principle and make sure institutions are accountable.”

Melissa Harris-Perry, a former Princeton colleague of West’s who is now a political scientist at Tulane University, has become one of his most outspoken opponents. She observed in The Nation last year that even West’s critique of Obama is hypocritical. In the Truthdig interview, West implied that the president, having been raised by whites, is uneasy in his black skin, and he accused Obama of being “most comfortable with upper-­middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart.” Harris-Perry pointed out that the same might be said of West, who has spent the largest portion of his career “comfortably ensconced” at Harvard and Princeton. These are “not places,” she adds, “that have a particularly liberating history for black men.”

West grew up in Sacramento, California, the second of four children, in a middle-class family. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father worked as a civilian on the local Air Force base. West was a prodigious reader—the kind of kid who read all the books in the Bookmobile. He was also a track star and a violinist. But the childhood stories that most predict West’s present position in life are those that feature a young Cornel beating up kids whom he perceived as bullies—and one time, smacking a pregnant teacher for insisting that he pledge allegiance to the flag.

West calls himself a “Christian revolutionary,” for the Jesus in whom he believes is no anodyne role model but a social radical who predicted a total reversal of the status quo. West’s Jesus cared most of all for those the Gospel of Matthew calls “the least of these.” He said the poor would gain heaven before the rich, and he especially invited society’s outcasts—the lepers and the prostitutes—into his circle. West’s youthful rage on behalf of the have-nots led him to Black Panther meetings in high school. For his Ph.D. thesis, he wrote about the ultimate social revolutionary—Karl Marx—and his ethical motivations. He joined Democratic Socialists of America in 1982 and has been a member ever since.

This connection between Christianity and social revolution makes West a “liberation theologian,” a person who, as James Cone explained it to me, “attempts to understand the Christian Gospel from the perspective of people who are marginalized and poor and who have been excluded from mainstream society.” Liberation theology does not always have a Marxist or socialist flavor, but in West’s hands, it does. Poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia, the self-loathing and passivity of marginalized groups—these are problems rooted in an entrenched, hierarchical capitalist system that perpetuates and thrives on oppression.

“We need,” West told me, “a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to ordinary people, ordinary citizens. I don’t know how it happens. The central political system right now is decrepit, it’s broken. Congress legalized bribery and normalized corruption. Presidential candidates are basically bought off by big money. Both of them. In both parties, oligarchs rule. Mean-spirited Republicans, oligarchs rule. And milquetoast, spineless Democrats—oligarchs rule. Democrats [are] much better than Republicans but still caught within the oligarchy.” The revolution West proposes is “going to be fought less in the political system and in the courts than in the streets.”

West was first arrested for social protest in college and has been arrested about nine times since, most recently last year as part of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. He wouldn’t put it this bluntly, but it is his idea of Christian justice that inspires him to civil disobedience—and to protest, as he did last week, against stop-and-frisk in New York City. When West appears on Fox News and calls the right-wing pundit Sean Hannity his “dear brother,” he is making a show of his Christian faith, for Jesus told his followers to love their enemies.