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Musician slain in Black Arts Movement District, downtown Oakland
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Pig Murder in South Carolina
North Charleston NAACP ‘Not Satisfied’ With Police Officer’s Murder Charge
In this frame from video provided by Attorney L. Chris Stewart, representing the family of Walter Lamer Scott, Scott appears to be running away from City Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager, right, in North Charleston, S.C. (Courtesy of L. Chris Stewart via AP)
The shooting took place after officer Michael Slager, 33, pulled over 50-year-old Walter Scott for a broken taillight. Police say a struggle ensued and Scott began running away with the officer’s Taser when Officer Slager fired his weapon eight times.
MARVIN X OFTEN RETREATS TO WRITE IN BEAUFORT, SOUTH CAROLINA, ON THE LAND OF BAM QUEEN HURRIYAH ASAR
I am so thankful my BAM comrade and partner Hurriyah gives me space from time to time to write in the paradise of Beaufort, South Carolina. It is heaven to me and I appreciate her hospitality. I love sitting on the beach as the tide rolls in, and even while it dwells. I enjoy the ducks, turkeys, chickens, doves, guineas and other fowl on her land. Hurriyah is truly Queen Mother of the West Coast Black Arts Movement. In San Francisco, Hurriyah (then Ethna Wyatt from Chicago) held Black Arts West Theatre together: Ed Bullins, Hillary Broadus, Duncan Barbar, Carl Bossisser, Danny Glover, Vonetta McGee; musicians: Earle Davis, Monte Waters, Oliver Johnson, Dewey Redman, Rafael Donald Garrett, BJ, et al.
Don't send your dead dog to South Carolina, they think they won the Civil War, yes, they live in the grand denial. So let us not linger in Jerusalem, let us move on to the Second Civil War. I can say I know a little about South Carolina. What a beautiful land, ah, paradise on earth, islands and islands where the Gullah Negroes/Africans lived in almost racial purity. Amiri Baraka came from Johns Island, renamed Jones. Dr. J. Herman Blake, sociologist who brought Malcolm X to UC Berkeley, who advised Dr. Huey P. Newton on his PhD at UC Santa Cruz, also from John's Island. Ain't Mechelle Obama a Gullah Negro/African?
But understand South Carolina, although I am thankful it has served as a writing retreat for me, thanks to my friend Hurriyah Asar. And I am blessed to receive knowledge of the Yoruba religion from the African Village in Sheldon, SC.
But it is a slave community, full of ignut nigguhs though they are blessed with Gullah African consciousness, a beautiful thang. But even the Gullah youth have turned into Nigguhs who want to leave those Islands of Paradise for Savannah and Atlanta so they can die like dogs in the streets, enjoying the best of urbanity. I wish somebody could hep me!
Last time I was in South Carolina, including Charleston, I was told to say nothing, just shut up while you're here. We're not going to help you promote your book, so just shut up cause we tired of you Cali Nigguhs comin' here talkin that radical shit then leavin', then we got to deal with this Peckerwood who knows you were staying with us and now he wants to retaliate on us fayo shit. You know we all got three minimum wage jobs to make ends meet, so now all he got to do is fire us from one of those jobs and we can't pay the house note or car note or pussy bill, yeah, let's keep it real!
FYI, I wrote How to Recover from the Addiction to White Supremacy in South Carolina, Beaufort. When I went to Staples to copy the manuscript, the sister asked, "Where you from?"
"I'm from here!"
"Naw you ain't!"
"Why you say I ain't from here?"
"Cause we don't say white supremacy down here. We know it, but we don't say it!"
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Kichange Journal for parents and children, created by Amira Jackmon
Location: 2342 Shattuck Avenue #816, Berkeley, California, United States ![United States]()
Kichange
Kichange! The only currency for today's modern kid
Startup/business
California, United States![United States]()
http://kichange.com
Startup/business
California, United States
http://kichange.com
Company description
Kichange™ is an exciting new, patent pending incentive system that uses tokens or “Kichange” as a reward for positive behavior. Once earned, Kichange™ is redeemable by kids for privileges in and around the home – like screen time, playdates and extra-curricular activities – according to Kichange™ rates predetermined by the family. Kichange gives today's parents much needed "currency" with their kids while helping children draw the connection between societal expectations and the positive characteristics that we all desire to embody.Use of Kichange™ enhances social-emotional learning and math and writing skills and introduces basic economic principles. It is recommended for children aged 6-12.
_____________________________________
Amira Jackmon is the Founder of Kichange™. Amira is an attorney who, for the last four years, has operated as a solo practitioner serving issuers and underwriters in complex public finance transactions and advising small business owners in transactional and litigation matters. Prior to that, she was an associate attorney in a large San Francisco-based law firm. Amira graduated from Stanford Law with a J.D. and from Yale University with a B.A. in Psychology. With her background in finance, her interest in psychology and her experience as a mother, the launch of Kichange™ is a logical next step in her life path.
Inspiration
Since the time that he could barely talk and walk, my son enjoyed a LOVE/HATE relationship with a neighborhood child (we’ll call him "Max"). My son loved to go and play with Max whenever he had the opportunity. But Max was, to put it bluntly, a bully. Though he was, at heart, a good kid, he’d often tease my son by calling him “baby” and other names. They'd argue and sometimes things would even get physical (although it was always an "accident"). My son would often run home crying. Nonetheless, he'd be just as eager to go back there the next day. As a mom, I didn’t know what to do. Of course, if I prohibited him from going to play with Max he’d be just as angry.Through a community workshop I learned a great practice for increasing self-knowledge and writing more effective affirmations. It involves recording very specific instances of positive behavior. I used the technique for myself initially and had great results letting go of old, unhelpful labels about myself. Then I thought, wouldn't it be great to have had this record from a very early age? That's when I started using the practice with my son. We kept a journal to record this work.
One day, when my son was about 4 or 5, he came home crying after Max called him a baby yet again. I was frustrated. “Why do you keep going over there!” I wanted to scream. Instead, as patiently as I could, I asked him, “Well are you a baby?”
“No!” he insists.
“Well what are you?”
“I'm a big boy!"
"Ok, well what else are you besides a 'big boy'"
Shrugging his shoulders, "I don’t know.”
In a flash, it came to me! “Well, go get your journal. Let’s read about who you are.”
He got out his journal and we sat down and began to read some of the entries. Some entries related back to occurrences when he was just 2 years old (I did the writing back then). Instantly, his demeanor changed. His anger dissolved. We both chuckled as we read through these endearing snapshots from his life. We read for less than 5 minutes but it was enough. He was no longer angry at Max and he chose to play happily at home for the rest of the afternoon. Inside, I was ecstatic. Finally, I was no longer helpless. Now I had a go-to-tool to use whenever the inevitable conflict with Max arose.
We have continued to journal in this way and to read from the journal periodically. These days, when my son comes to me upset that someone said this or that, all I have to say is, “Go get your journal.” He generally doesn’t even let me finish my sentence. “Ok, ok, mom. That’s ok. I know who I am.” As an added benefit, this practice has also helped my son to see good in others even when those others do not always behave in a positive manner.
Because of how helpful this tool has been for me and my family, I decided to create the app to share it with others.
How it works
The app has an easy to use interface that helps children write down their positive behavior. The child can take a picture as additional evidence of the positive behavior (artwork, report cards, awards). The entries are compiled in a timeline fashion to be reviewed by the child from time to time.To motivate the child to make the journal entries, the child is rewarded with 5 "Kichange" for each journal entry. "Kichange" is currency for kids that I created as part of a new incentive system. Parents decide how the Kichange can be used. Rewards can be things like screen time, playdates or treats...that is, whatever has "currency" for the kids .
The Kichange journal app provides kids the language and a tool to be masters of their own personal currency and cultivators of their own inner peace. With these skills and knowledge, kids are armed with a powerful immunizer against life's inevitable challenges whether it be bullying, an over-critical parent or the child's own doubts. By dissolving anger and fear, the opportunity for happiness is thereby expanded.
What's next for Kichange Journal App
Kichange is in the beta testing phase and is expected to be available for Iphone/Ipad users in early 2015.Later versions of the app will allow the users to order a hard copy of the journal entries and associated photos as a keepsake.
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What is Kichange?
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CAN I GET THROUGH THE DAY WITHOUT MY AK
IN HONOR OF ICE CUBE
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SIR, I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN GET THROUGH THE DAY
WITHOUT MY AK
MATTER OF FACT
I AIN'T USING NO AK
I'M CHOPPIN OFF HEADS
THROWING 'EM IN DA BAY
HEY HEY
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RATS HAVE NO RIGHT TO LIFE
BLACK LIVES MATTER
RATS LIVES DON'T MATTER
REVOLUTION AIN'T FOR BOY SCOUTS
MILLER LITE MOTHERFUCKERS
RATS NEED HEADS CHOPPED
BUKU HARAM FASHION
ISIS MANNER
GOD DON'T LOVE COWARD SOLDIERS
GOD LOVES WARRIORS
GOD DON'T LOVE COWARD SOLDIERS
GOD LOVES WARRIORS.
DON'T BE A COWARD COMMUNITY
OUR TRADITION IS REVOLUTION
PULLMAN PORTERS, BLACK PANTHERS
NO COWARDS ALLOWED
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THE STAFF OF SAN FRANCISCO'S BLACK DIALOGUE MAGAZINE VISITED SOLEDAD PRISON, 1966, THEY MADE A PRESENTATION BEFORE THE BLACK CULTURE CLUB. THE CLUB, CHAIRED BY ELDRIDGE CLEAVER AND BUNCHY CARTER, WAS THE BEGINNING OF THE AMERICAN PRISON MOVEMENT. BLACK DIALOGUE STAFF INCLUDES AUBREY LABRIE, MX, ABDUL SABRY, AL YOUNG, ARTHUR SHERIDAN AND DUKE WILLIAMS, MOST WERE STUDENTS AT SAN FRANCISCO STATE UNIVERSITY. HENCE THE CONNECTION BETWEEN BLACK STUDENTS, BLACK INTELLECTUALS AND THE BLACK PRISON MOVEMENT.
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ELDRIDGE CLEAVER AND HIS COMRADE ALPRENTICE BUNCHY CARTER, WHO WAS ASSASSINATED ALONG WITH JOHN HUGGINS ON THE CAMPUS OF UCLA BY MEMBERS OF THE US ORGANIZATION.
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IN DA BAY
PULLMAN PORTER LAND
BLACK PANTHER LAND
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT LAND
BLACK STUDENTS UNION LAND
BLACK STUDIES LAND
ASE! ASE! ASE!
BETTER AX SOMEBODY!
BETTER AX SOMEBODY!
--MARVIN X
SIR, I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN GET THROUGH THE DAY
WITHOUT MY AK
MATTER OF FACT
I AIN'T USING NO AK
I'M CHOPPIN OFF HEADS
THROWING 'EM IN DA BAY
HEY HEY
RATS HAVE NO RIGHT TO LIFE
BLACK LIVES MATTER
RATS LIVES DON'T MATTER
REVOLUTION AIN'T FOR BOY SCOUTS
MILLER LITE MOTHERFUCKERS
RATS NEED HEADS CHOPPED
BUKU HARAM FASHION
ISIS MANNER
GOD DON'T LOVE COWARD SOLDIERS
GOD LOVES WARRIORS
GOD DON'T LOVE COWARD SOLDIERS
GOD LOVES WARRIORS.
DON'T BE A COWARD COMMUNITY
OUR TRADITION IS REVOLUTION
PULLMAN PORTERS, BLACK PANTHERS
NO COWARDS ALLOWED
REVOLUTIONARY COMRADE ANGELA DAVIS
COMRADE GEORGE JACKSON, MESSIAH OF THE PRISON MOVEMENT
PULLMAN PORTER LAND
BLACK PANTHER LAND
BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT LAND
BLACK STUDENTS UNION LAND
BLACK STUDIES LAND
ASE! ASE! ASE!
BETTER AX SOMEBODY!
BETTER AX SOMEBODY!
--MARVIN X
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POEM FOR AB AND AMINA BARAKA
DRAMA TOO
LOVE DRAMA
CAN'T HEP IT
DRAMA IS MA LIFE
IMAGINE
IN THE HOUSE OF BARAKA
FULL OF DRAMA
24/7
BUT AIN'T TELLIN' NOTHING
TOO MUCH LOVE FADA BARAKAS
CAN'T PARTY WIT NOBODY ELSE
PARTY PARTY PARTY
TALK REVOLUTION
PARTY PARTY
REVOLUTION REVOLUTON
HEP ME SOMEBODY
DINNER AT THE SPANISH RESTAURANT NEXT TO CITY HALL
BAR HOPING ACROSS NEWARK
AMIRI AND AMINA FRIENDS LIKE NO OTHER
LOVE MY FRIENDS TO THE END
NO MATTER THEIR NEGROCITIES
WHAT ABOUT MY OWN
BARAKA SAY MARVIN DON'T STEAL MY TERM NEGROCITIES
OK AB
BUT CHECK THIS
NEGROCITIES
AN INFLAMMATION OF THE NEGROID GLAND AT THE BASE OF THE BRAIN
CAUSED BY BAD HABITS
WHAT YOU SAY IN BLACK MASS
WHERE THE SOUL'S PRINT SHOULD BE
THERE IS ONLY A CELLULOSE POUCH OF DISGUSTING HABITS!
--MARVIN X
410/15
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Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters
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Newark, NJ: National Conference on Leadership, Ideas, Action, October 8-10, 2015
The Honorable Mayor Ras Baraka, Newark, New Jersey
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News from the Indigenous Americas: Castro on Obama; the transition of writer Eduardo Galeano of Uruguay
Cuban President Raul Castro went off on U.S. policy towards Cuba in his Summit of the Americas speech today, before apologizing to President Obama and absolving him of any blame in the matter.
According to reports fromthe summit, Castro went on and on about grievances Cuba has had with the United States for decades, bringing up military invasions, occupations, the Bay of Pigs, et cetera.
And then, for some reason, Castro ended up apologizing to Obama. He said, “I apologize to Obama for expressing myself so emotionally. President Obama has no responsibility for this. There were 10 presidents before him; all have a debt to us, but not President Obama.”
He even pointed out that Obama was born after the conflict originally began, a point Obama himself made when he spoke.
Castro also took some time to personally praise Obama and call him an honest man.
Uruguayan author and left-wing intellectual Eduardo Galeano has died at a hospital in Montevideo aged 74 after suffering from lung cancer.
It chronicles the deep injustices of Latin America and its exploitation by capitalist and imperialist forces.
Mr Galeano's trilogy "Memory of Fire" also received wide praise when it was published in the 1980s.
It is a three-volume narrative of the history of the Americas which starts in the pre-Columbian period and ends in 1980.
He was best known for his book, Open Veins of Latin America, which gained popularity again after the late Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, gave it as a gift to US President Barack Obama at the Summit of the Americas in 2009.
Mr Galeano also wrote fiction, essays and journalism and, before becoming one of Latin America's best known writers, had many other jobs.
He worked at a factory, as a bank clerk, a painter and a political cartoonist. Mr Galeano was also known for his drawings and political cartoons.
Mr Galeano went into exile when the Uruguayan military took power in 1973 - first to Argentina, where he founded the literary review Crisis, and then to Spain. He returned to Uruguay after democracy was restored in 1985. Local media are reporting that Mr Galeano left a new text to be published after his death, according to the BBC's Veronica Smink in Argentina.
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Bandung Conference at 60 by Norman Richmond, aka Jalali
By Norman (Otis) Richmond aka Jalali
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrival in Canada is major news.
Modi is being greeted like he is a musical star like Bob Marley or
Bruce Springsteen. India has a long history of leaning left and not
being a servant of Western interest. It is no surprise that this Asian
nation is a foundation member of BRICS.
The new kid on the economic block is BRICS an association of five
major emerging national economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and
South Africa. The grouping was originally known as "BRIC" before the
inclusion of South Africa in 2010.
They are distinguished by their large, fast-growing economies and
significant influence on regional and global affairs; all five are
G-20 members. Since 2010, the BRICS nations have met annually at
formal summits. Russia currently holds the chair of the BRICS group,
and will host BRICS seventh the summit in July 2015.
BRICS countries represent almost 3 billion people, or approximately
40% of the world population. The five nations have a combined nominal
GDP of US$16.039 trillion, equivalent to approximately 20% of the
gross world product, and an estimated US$4 trillion in combined
foreign reserves. Many feel that BRICS is a continuation of the
Bandung Conference.
History will record two Bandung conferences. The first took place 60
years ago between April 18-24, 1955 at which 29 African and Asian
nations met in Bandung, Indonesia to promote economic and cultural
cooperation and to oppose colonialism.
The idea of the Bandung Conference came from Ahmed Sukarno of
Indonesia. It was conceived in Colombo, Indonesia, where the Colombo
powers – India, Pakistan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma (now Myanmar)
and Indonesia, the host country – met in April 1954. The Bandung
Conference led to the 1961 creation of the Non-Aligned Movement.
At that moment in history Josip Broz Tito was the president of
Yugoslavia. The Non–Aligned Movement was founded in Belgrade. The idea
for the group was largely conceived by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first
prime minister. Other players were U Nu Burma’s first prime minister,
Sukarno Indonesia’s first president, Gamal Abdel Nasser and Kwame
Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president.
The second Bandung Conference took place in 2005. The first head of
state to arrive at the 2005 conference was South African President
Thabo Mbeki. Ironically, South Africa along with Israel, Taiwan and
North and South Korea were all barred from the 1955 conference. In
light of recent tragic events, Mbeki visited the tsunami stricken
province of Aceh before he proceeded to the conference.
I first heard about the Bandung Conference in the mid-1960s while
listening to a speech by El-Hajj Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X) titled
"Message to the Grassroots,” which was first delivered at the King
Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit on November 10, 1963. Malcolm talked
about places and faces I had never heard of, however, he didn't get it
completely correct. There were White people at the Bandung conference.
Marshal Tito represented Yugoslavia, and there were American,
Australian and numerous members of the European press at the
conference. In fact, African American journalist Ethel Payne, who was
at Bandung, pointed out, “The British had sent just hordes of
correspondents, and the Dutch and the Germans and all the European
countries." A new biography “Eye On The Struggle” about Payne has
been published by Harper Collins.
Africans in North America paid close attention to this historic event.
In Canada, Daniel Braithwaite's organization, which had a relationship
with the U.S.-based Council on African Affairs (CAA), sent a message
of support. Braithwaite was so impressed by CAA co-founder Paul
Robeson that he not only started a CAA chapter in Toronto, he named
his son Paul in tribute to Robeson. Other Africanists like W.E.B.
DuBois, Alphaeus and Dorothy Hunton, along with Robeson, were members
of the Council on African Affairs.
At the time of the first Bandung Conference, the North American left,
in general, and the African liberation movement inside the United
States, in particular were under attack. Senator Joseph McCarthy was
looking for a "red under every bed.” Robeson, "the Tallest Tree in the
Forest," wanted to attend the conference but couldn't because the
U.S.government had taken his passport. Ditto for DuBois. However,
several African American politicians and journalists found themselves
in Indonesia from April 18-25, 1955. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Carl T.
Rowan, Dr. Marguerite Cartwright, journalist Payne and Richard Wright
all were there.
Powell, the Congressman from Harlem, went to the Conference on a dare.
He wanted to attend the event to represent the interests of
U.S.imperialism by talking about the progress the Negro in America was
making. "It will mark the first time in history that the world's
non-White people have held such a gathering," he told reporters in
Washington, D.C., "and it could be the most important of this
century." Powell, no matter what we think of him, knew what time it
was. His appeals to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and others in the
State Department fell on deaf ears. The flamboyant Powell was told the
U.S. government saw no need to send an official observer to Bandung.
However, he got there compliment of the African American weekly
newspaper, New York Age-Defender. Karl Evanzz pointed out in his
brilliant book, 'The Judas Factor', "There was at least one unofficial
observer: at the request of John Foster Dulles' brother, CIA Director
Allen Dulles, a young African American journalist named Carl T. Rowan
covered the conference."
Rowan went on to become the Director of the United States Information
Agency. He also went on to alienate a generation of Africans in
America after the February 21, 1965 assassination of Malcolm X.
Rowan's statement after Malcolm's death was: "All this about an
ex-convict, ex-dope peddler who became a racial fanatic."
Of the two female African American journalists at the conference, the
well-connected Dr. Cartwright represented a chain of White dailies and
the United Nations. The lesser-known Payne was the new kid on the
block and represented the Chicago Defender, which was part of John
Sengstacke's chain of Black weeklies.
Payne, who went on to be crowned "The First Lady of the Black Press"
said she had little or no contact in Indonesia with Dr. Cartwright. Of
Cartwright, Payne said, "She had a desk at the U.N. and so she had
quite a lot of access that I didn't have." However, Payne did network
with writer Richard Wright, a one-time member of the Communist Party
U.S.A. who went on his own and wrote the book, “The Color Curtain”,
about The Bandung Conference. “The Color Curtain” was first published
by University Press of Mississippi in 1956. Wright wrote about the
faces and places in Indonesia in 1955, and one can feel him learning
about what would come to be called "The Third World.”
The first Bandung Conference was attended by 21 Asian, seven African
and one Eastern European country. The second was attended by 54 Asian
and 52 African nations. The Asian-African Conference has been
transformed into the Asia-Africa Summit. A recent re-reading of
Robeson's “Here I Stand” made me realize how important these two
conferences are to humanity. At both, questions of world peace,
South-South cooperation, nuclear weapons and Palestine were discussed.
The great Paul Robeson wanted to attend the Bandung Conference.
Robeson summed it up in these words. He said, “How I would love to see
my brothers from Africa, India, China, Indonesia and from all the
people represented at Bandung. In your midst are old friends I knew in
London years ago, where I first became part of the movement for
colonial freedom -- the many friends from India and Africa and the
West Indies with whom I shared hopes and dreams of a new day for the
oppressed colored peoples of the world. And I might have come as an
observer had I been granted a passport by the State Department whose
lawyers have argued that "in view of the applicant's frank admission
that he has argued that "in view of the applicant's frank admission
that he has been fighting for the freedom of the colonial people of
Africa . . .the diplomatic embarrassment that could arise from the
presence abroad of such a political meddler (sic!) travelling under
the protection of
an American passport, is easily imaginable!"
So all the best to all of you. Together with all of progressive
mankind, with lovers of peace and freedom everywhere, I salute your
history-making conference.”
Norman (Otis) Richmond, aka Jalali, was born in Arcadia, Louisiana,
and grew up in Los Angeles. He left Los Angles after refusing to fight
in Vietnam because he felt that, like the Vietnamese, Africans in the
United States were colonial subjects.
Richmond is currently working as a producer/host of Diasporic Music on
Uhuru Radio (uhururadio.com)
His column Diasporic Music appears monthly in The Burning Spear newspaper
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Video: Master Teacher Marvin X returns to Academy of Da Corner in Oakland's Black Arts Movement District, 14th Street
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters
Black Bird Press News & Review: Video: Slave Catchers, Slave Resisters
This video will help you understand the origin of pigs and their psychopathic behavior toward North American Africans yesterday and today. No police review board can stop pig behavior. The nature of a pig is to oink!
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This video will help you understand the origin of pigs and their psychopathic behavior toward North American Africans yesterday and today. No police review board can stop pig behavior. The nature of a pig is to oink!
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San Francisco Film Festival presents: The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, directed by Stanley Nelson
Black Panther Party revolutionary Queens
Ancestor Dr. Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party
Director Stanley Nelson
The Stanley Nelson's documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, will be screened at the San Francisco Film Festival, Saturday, April 25, 2015, 3:00pm. Marvin X was interviewed for the film. He attended Oakland's Merritt College with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. He introduced Eldridge Cleaver to the BPP: "Marvin X was my teacher. Many of our comrades came through his Black Arts Theatre: Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Emory Douglas, Samuel Napier, Judy Juanita, JoAnn Mitchell, et al," said Dr. Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party.
George Jackson, Messiah of the Black Prison Movement, author of Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
Black Panther Party co-founder, Bobby Seale and Marvin X
Marvin X and Tarika Lewis, violinist and first female member of the Black Panther Party
Actor Ossie Davis, Dr. Nathan Hare, Bobby Seale, Dr. Carlton Goodlette
Angela Davis, Marvin X, Sonia Sanchez
We are pleased to invite you to a screening of The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, which will be held next weekend at
the 58th San Francisco International Film Festival! Screening times are as follows:
Saturday April 25, 2015 at
3:00 p.m. at the
Sundance Kabuki Cinemas. Please RSVP as soon as possble to this email address, or call 646-262-7757. We hope you can attend what promises to be an extraordinary event.
Presented by the San Francisco Film Society, the Festival is the longest-running film festival in the Americas. As it celebrates its 58th edition, SFIFF has screened more than 6,000 films, entertained and inspired roughly two million filmgoers and hosted thousands of prominent guests and luminaries. Press coverage of films, guests and events is extensive.
The Festival screening
The Festival screening
will be a Bay Area premiere
and we are very excited
to be
presenting this at the Festival.There will be an additional screening on Tuesday
April 28, 2015at
6:15 p.m. at theSundance Kabuki Cinemas.
Tickets for that screening are available online at festival.sffs.org and at the Festival box office. located at Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, 1881 Post Street (at Fillmore), Open daily 3:30-7:30 pm. General admission tickets are $15, Senior/student/disabled tickets are $14. Best regards,
Nicole London
--
Nicole London
Associate Producer| The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
Firelight Films
324 Convent Avenue
New York, NY 10031
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Oh, Marvin, you never cease to amaze me!--Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf
Ishmael Reed says, "If you want motivation and inspiration, don't spend all that money going to workshops and seminars, just go stand at 14th and Broadway and watch Marvin X at work. He's Plato teaching on the streets of Oakland." FYI, above pic is from the Feb. 7, 2015, BAM 50th Anniversary Celebration at Oakland's Laney College. photo by South Park Kenny Johnson
Master Teacher Marvin X at his Academy of da Corner, a multipurpose center, i.g., micro loan bank, literacy, mental health, (layman's grief and trauma counseling), mentoring, economic independence or entrepreneurship training, event organizing, presently working on the Black Arts Movement's 27 City Tour in honor of Amiri Baraka. photo Adam Turner
Academy of da Corner on Oakland's Lakeshore District, Saturday's only
Academy of da Corner, Berkeley (ASHBY BART STATION), Sunday's only
Two Gemini madmen genius: Marvin X, May 29; Sun Ra, May 22
During 1972, both madmen lectured at the University of California, Berkeley in Black Studies.
Sun Ra joined Marvin X at his off campus theatre, Black Educational Theatre on O'farrel Street, between Fillmore and Webster, an old abandoned Greek Orthodox church. They produced a five hour production of Marvin's BAM classic one act play Flowers for the Trashman, musical version named Take Care of Business or TCB, music by Sun Ra. Production was at the Harding Theatre on Divisadero Street. The Sun Reporter reviewed the five hour concert without intermission. Production included the Sun Ra Arkestra, the Black Educational Theatre actors; the Raymond Sawyer dancers and the Ellendar Barnes Dancers; a cast of fifty. Again, the concert was five hours without intermission, such is the nature of the Sun Ra/Marvin X experience. Somebody better say Ase'!
Chicago's David Boykin, organizer of the Sun Ra Conference at the University of Chicago
BAM POET'S CHOIR AND ARKESTRA,
MALCOLM X JAZZ/ART FEST., OAKLAND 2014
My friend the devil, Marvin X's memoir of Eldridge Cleaver. He finished the first draft in three weeks while on a national book tour, prompted by questions from his daughter Nefertiti at her house in Houston, TX. He published each chapter daily in Chickenbones.com. It was literally a writing in progress for the world to see on the Internet. See the review by Rudolph Lewis on Chickenbones.com.
On a recent national book tour, University of Houston students engage Marvin X in the Africana Studies Department
Poet autographing books at University of Houston, TX
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Will it be in the interest of the Cuban Government to give up Assata?
Mug shot of Assata Shakur, taken on May 2, 1973 Wikimedia Commons
The U.S. is not letting the matter of getting Assata Shakur extradited back to the States go gently into that good night, despite being told numeroustimes that Cuban officials have said that the topic is off the table.
According to State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke, now that President Barack Obama has moved the diplomatic ball further by taking Cuba off a list of nations that sponsor terrorism, the status of Shakur and other convicts who sought asylum in Cuba will be up for discussion, NorthJersey.com reports.
Shakur, also known as Joanne Chesimard, was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1977. She escaped prison and in 1984 was granted political asylum by Cuba, where she’s lived ever since.
On Wednesday the State Department said that talks with Cuban officials included mention of Shakur. However, Cuban officials have not responded to media inquiries about whether that’s true and, if so, what was actually said about the possibility of extraditing Shakur back to the U.S.
There is speculation that the State Department is giving greater weight to that possibility than what was actually discussed regarding Shakur.
Shakur’s lawyer, Lennox Hinds, a professor at Rutgers University, thinks that’s the case. “I think it is a spin being put out by the U.S. government. I have no reason to give any credence to it,” Hinds said. He told NorthJersey.com that Cuban authorities recently told him that Shakur’s political asylum would not be revoked.
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Message to the Black Man in America: Under the Shadow of Death!
Under the Shadow of Death
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We live under the shadow of death. We fled from the cowardly enemy devils of the South, seeking refuge in the same cowardly enemies’ brother in the North. The enemy devils of the South followed us to the North to see that his brother of the North does not treat us any better than they did in the South.
They seek police jobs so that they can beat and kill us who are trying to escape. They seek to kill us, or get us killed, at any price. They do not care about our loyalty to them. In their hearts there is death for us, the Black Man in America.
Today, they hold out promises to you only to deceive you. They know that Allah (God) is here offering to seat us in heaven at once. And since hell is their appointed place, they are trying to get us to go to hell with them on false promises.
I have told you. Believe it or let it alone. We live "Under The Shadow of Death."
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Danny Glover and Selma James at St. Paul's Church, Sunday, April 26, 3-6pm, 2015
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Black Bird Press News & Review: Academy of da Corner students perform Marvin X's Mythology of Pussy and Dick
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The Ghost of Cornel West by Michael Eric Dyson
The Ghost of Cornel West
President Obama betrayed him.
He’s stopped publishing new work.
He’s alienated his closest friends
and allies. What happened to
America’s most exciting
black scholar?
ByMichael Eric Dyson
Illustration by Hello Von
April 19, 2015
Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned” is the best-known line from William Congreve’s The Mourning Bride. But I’m concerned with the phrase preceding it, which captures wrath in more universal terms: “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.” Even an angry Almighty can’t compete with mortals whose love turns to hate.
Cornel West’s rage against President Barack Obama evokes that kind of venom. He has accused Obama of political minstrelsy, calling him a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface”; taunted him as a “brown-faced Clinton”; and derided him as a “neoliberal opportunist.” In 2011, West and I were both speakers at a black newspaper conference in Chicago. During a private conversation, West asked how I escaped being dubbed an “Obama hater” when I was just as critical of the president as he was. I shared my three-part formula for discussing Obama before black audiences: Start with love for the man and pride in his epic achievement; focus on the unprecedented acrimony he faces as the nation’s first black executive; and target his missteps and failures. No matter how vehemently I disagree with Obama, I respect him as a man wrestling with an incredibly difficult opportunity to shape history. West looked into my eyes, sighed, and said: “Well, I guess that’s the difference between me and you. I don’t respect the brother at all.”
West’s animus is longstanding, and only intermittently broken by bouts of calculated love. In February 2007, West lambasted Obama’s decision to announce his bid for the presidency in Illinois, instead of at journalist Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union meeting in Virginia, calling it proof that the nascent candidate wasn’t concerned about black people. “Coming out there is not fundamentally about us. It’s about somebody else. [Obama’s] got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties, and he’s got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length.” It is hard to know which is more astonishing: West faulting Obama for starting his White House run in the state where he’d been elected to the U.S. Senate—or the breathtaking insularity of equating Smiley’s conference with black America.
Despite West’s disapproval of Obama, he eventually embraced the political phenom, crossing the country as a surrogate and touting his Oval Office bona fides. The two publicly embraced at a 2007 Apollo Theater fundraiser in Harlem during which West christened Obama “my brother... companion and comrade.” Obama praised West as “a genius, a public intellectual, a preacher, an oracle,” and “a loving person.”
Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses. If black American scholars are like prizefighters, then West is not the greatest ever; that title belongs to W.E.B. Du Bois. Not the most powerful ever; that’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. Not the most influential; that would include Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, Black History Week founder Carter G. Woodson, historian John Hope Franklin, feminist bell hooks, Afrocentricity pioneer Molefi Kete Asante—and undoubtedly William Julius Wilson, whose sociological research has profoundly shaped racial debate and the public policies of at least two presidents. West may be a heavyweight champ of controversy, but he has competition as the pound-for-pound greatest: sociologists Oliver Cox, E. Franklin Frazier, and Lawrence D. Bobo; historians Robin D.G. Kelley, Nell Irvin Painter, and David Levering Lewis; political scientists Cedric Robinson and Manning Marable; art historian Richard J. Powell; legal theorists Kimberlé Crenshaw and Randall Kennedy; cultural critic Tricia Rose; and the literary scholars Hortense Spillers and Farah Jasmine Griffin—all are worthy contenders.
Yet West is, in my estimation, the most exciting black American scholar ever. At his peak, each new idea topped the last with greater vitality. His fluency in a remarkable range of disciplines spilled effortlessly from his pen, and the public performance of his massive erudition inspired many of his students to try to follow suit, from religious studies scholars Obery Hendricks and Eddie Glaude Jr. to cultural critics Imani Perry and Dwight McBride. West may not be Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Jack Johnson, Jersey Joe Walcott, or Sugar Ray Robinson. He’s more Mike Tyson, a prodigiously gifted champion who rose to the throne early and tore through opponents with startling menace and ferocity. His reign was brutal, his punch devastating, his impact staggering.
It was that sense of scholarly excitement that drew me to West after I read his first book, Prophesy Deliverance!, in 1982. The book validated the intellectual passion I’d courted in my youth, never leaving me as I navigated some challenging circumstances. I had been a promising student from a Detroit ghetto who won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school outside of town on the condition that I repeat the eleventh grade. I confronted racism head on for the first time at that new school, and it rocked me: I was expelled during my second year for poor performance. I returned to the inner city and the prospect of collecting my diploma at night school. I got married and became a teenage father, one who worked in an auto-supply factory and hustled odd jobs after high school. I didn’t start college until the fall of 1979, one month before my twenty-first birthday. That same year, I divorced my son’s mother after moving South to attend the historically black Knoxville College. My father died two years later, and I made do for a spell with the only material inheritance he could pass on: a Chevy station wagon that had once served as the work vehicle for our Dyson & Sons grass-cutting, sod-laying, and odd jobs enterprise. Over the next few years, I served as pastor of three different churches in Tennessee while completing my degree at Carson-Newman College, 20 miles northeast of Knoxville, where I transferred in 1981 to get a firmer footing in my study of philosophy.
Hiroko Masuike / Getty Images
Before breaking with then-Senator Obama, West was an ardent supporter, appearing with him at a 2007 fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
When West’s book was published, my phone service at home had been shut off because I had no money to pay the bill. There was a pay telephone outside the laundromat where I washed my clothes, and one day, instead of doing the laundry, I spent my last $5 calling West at his Union Theological Seminary office in New York City. I rhapsodized about his philosophical acumen and cutting-edge theories of race for a while, and West let on that he had heard about me from a mutual friend and encouraged me to stay in touch. I took him at his word and soon scrounged up the money to drive the 600 miles from Tennessee to see him deliver a series of talks at Kalamazoo College.
West had not yet freed himself from reading his lectures to develop the rhetorical style for which he is justly celebrated: an extemporaneous exploration of ideas that features the improvised flourishes and tonal colors of a jazz musician and the rhythmic shifts and sonic manipulations of a gospel preacher. Yet even then West mesmerized, effortlessly surfing the broad waves of Western thought, defending the notion of black humanity while laying siege to white sectarianism—proving by his own impossibly literate performance that white superiority was a lie, at least as long as his gap-toothed mouth spit out esoteric knowledge.
West and I became dear friends. I admired his penetrating intellect and he nurtured my deepening commitment to a life of the mind. West wrote a letter of recommendation on my behalf when I applied to graduate school in 1984 and helped me to land at his alma mater Princeton, where he had been the first black student ever to earn a doctorate in philosophy, and where I became the second black student to earn a doctorate in religion. West had a huge crush on the R&B singer Anita Baker, and I got us tickets to see her perform in New Jersey. After a brief backstage introduction to the singer I had finagled, West relived his high school track glory and sprinted up the street in glee.
As a graduate student, I arranged for West to lecture at Princeton in the late ’80s, before he was an academic superstar, and I can still remember how he inventively grappled with the decline of European domination, the rise of American hegemony, and the decolonization of Third World countries, even as he spoke of the pervasive influence of black culture in the broader life of the nation, citing Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, and Frantz Fanon as major witnesses to the trends he outlined. I had observed literary scholar Houston Baker dazzle another Princeton audience with a dynamic and dramatic lecture, but West topped that performance with the sheer breadth of his inquiry and the erudite ad-libs to his written presentation.
West’s early work was a marvel of rigor and imagination. He rode the beast of philosophy with linguistic panache as he snagged deep concepts and big thinkers in his theoretical lasso and then herded thousands of stalking students into Ivy League classrooms packed to the rafters. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West invited Foucault to sing the “insurrection of subjugated knowledges” in the black revolutionary choir. The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989) ingeniously pitched American pragmatism as a multiracial conversation that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Du Bois, and Richard Rorty. And in Keeping Faith (1993), West gathered a slew of seminal essays on subjects like social theory and the philosophy of religion—baptizing poststructuralist thought in American waters while translating the insight of its biggest European stars with analytical verve.
At the age of 39, West catapulted to fame after struggling financially and became, deservedly, a far richer man with the publication of his best-known work, 1993’s Race Matters. It isn’t a scholarly book, per se, although its pages carry the weight of his formidable intellect as he traces the cultural dynamics of race with exquisite and uncharacteristic—for the time—lucidity. (Dense jargon was at its zenith in the postmodernist academy of the 1990s.) Race Matters changed how we speak of black identity in the United States. It gave our country a golden pun for matters of race that mattered more than they should and brought West the sort of celebrity that is intoxicating and distracting. West garnered glowing profiles in Newsweek and Time—in the same week—and explored his ideas on radio with Terry Gross and on television with Bill Moyers and Bill Maher. There was a certain satisfaction in West’s rise: One of the smartest men of his generation also became one of its most popular.
Anthony Barboza / Getty Images
Cornel West at Princeton in 1994, the year of the publication of Race Matters, the book that made him an academic celebrity.
The intellectual landscape had shifted dramatically beneath West’s feet by the time Obama went after the presidency. The Internet and social media ushered in new voices on the nation’s most vexing problems and made room for fresh thinking on race and identity. Even as the pace of West’s published scholarship slowed, he remained a powerful cultural presence. If West’s most notable book argued that race mattered, his celebrity and iconic status meant that his endorsement also mattered.
West remained allied with Obama until he took the White House and, in football parlance, faked left and ran right. “[Obama] posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit,” West complained in an interview with Salon. “He acted as if he was ... concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality, and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair.” It’s worth noting that the president’s actions were in keeping with the demands of his profession: Like most recent Democratic politicians, Obama nodded in a progressive direction while campaigning but toed a more centrist line when it came time to govern. What distinguishes West is that he assailed Obama’s insufficient leftism and proclaimed it a racial betrayal. “I would rather have a white president fundamentally dedicated to eradicating poverty and enhancing the plight of working people than a black president tied to Wall Street and drones,” he told The Guardian.
Long before their ideological schism, however, West believed himself personally betrayed by Obama because of his (supposed) disinterest after the election. It is a sad truth that most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates, leaving behind scores of briefly valued surrogates and supporters. West should have understood that Obama had had similar trysts with many others. But West felt spurned and was embittered.
This is where Congreve’s insight on love decomposed to rage comes crashing in. West has repeatedly declared that he did 65 engagements for the presidential campaign in 2008, and was offended when the president didn’t provide tickets to the inauguration. (Obama later told me in the White House that West left several voice messages, including prayers, from a blocked number with no instructions of where to return the call, a routine with which I was all too familiar.) In a 2011 interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig that appeared under the headline “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic,” West recalled his indignation during the Inauguration, when he arrived at his Washington hotel with his mother, and she noted that the bellman had a ticket to the event but not her son. “I couldn’t get a ticket for my mother and my brother,” West said. “We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’” Thus the left-wing critic found it unjust that the workingman and not the professor had a ticket to the inauguration. Only in a world where bankers and other fat cats greedily gobble rewards meant for everyday citizens would such a reversal appear unfair. J.P. Morgan might have been mad; Karl Marx would have been ecstatic.
This moment for West followed a pronounced and decades-long scholarly decline, something that did not escape the notice of other academics and intellectuals, none more notably than Lawrence Summers, the former president of Harvard, who clashed publicly with West. (West departed Harvard for Princeton in 2002.) Summers had reprimanded West for his varied side projects, everything from advising Reverend Al Sharpton’s failed presidential bid to his vanity musical ventures. I couldn’t endorse these criticisms, but I knew Summers was right when he pointed to West’s diminished scholarly output. It is not only that West’s preoccupations with Obama’s perceived failures distracted him, though that is true; more accurate would be to say that the last several years revealed West’s paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work, a trend far longer in the making. West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits. He hasn’t published without aid of a co-writer a single scholarly book since Keeping Faith, which appeared in 1993, the same year as Race Matters. West has repeatedly tried to recapture the glory of that slim classic by imitating the 1960s-era rhythm and blues singers he loves so much: Make another song that sounds just like the one that topped the charts. In 2004, West published Democracy Matters, an obvious recycling of both the title and themes of his work a decade earlier. It was his biggest seller since Race Matters.
Even a cursory survey of West’s recent work captures the noticeable diminishment of his intellectual force. Hope on a Tightrope (2008) is mostly a collection of West-ian wisdom spoken and then transcribed. The cover features West standing at a blackboard with the words “What Would West Say?” chalked again and again, like an after school punishment, a haunting hubris suggesting a parallel to “What Would Jesus Do?” His memoir Brother West (2009) is an embarrassing farrago of scholarly aspiration and breathless self-congratulation—West, for instance, deems his co-authored book The War Against Parents (1998) a “seminal text”; praises Race Matters as “the right book at the right time”; and brags that Democracy Matters sold over 100,000 copies, landed at No. 5 on TheNew York Times bestseller list, and “continues to influence many.” None of this competes with the description on West’s website of his first spoken word album, Sketches of My Culture, which claimed at the time of its release that in “all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history.”
Brother West was co-written with David Ritz, a writer best known for album liner notes and ghostwriting entertainers’ biographies—a sure sign of West’s dramatic plummet from his perch as a world-class intellectual. It’s one thing for Ray Charles to turn to Ritz; another thing entirely for a top-shelf scholar to concede that he can’t write for himself, or is too busy to do so. It is akin to Du Bois hiring Truman Capote to fashion his autobiography. The journalist David Masciotra called The Rich and the Rest of Us (2012), which was also co-authored, this time by Tavis Smiley, “a cover version of a hit performed better by other singers—Barbara Ehrenreich, Joseph Stiglitz, and William Julius Wilson, to name a few.” West’s latest, Black Prophetic Fire, published last year, is another talk book, this one edited by Christa Buschendorf, a German scholar who interviewed West. Last October, Masciotra reviewed Fire for The Daily Beast, and called it “a strange and disappointing culmination of [West’s] metamorphosis from philosopher to celebrity,” one that is in keeping with “his pattern of not solely authoring any books in the past ten years.” If you’re counting: That’s two talk books and two co-authored ones across a decade—not quite up to the high scholarly standard West set for himself long ago.
In Brother West, West admitted that he is “more a natural reader than natural writer,” adding that “writing requires a concerted effort and forced discipline,” but that he reads “as easily as I breathe.” I can say with certainty, as a college professor for the last quarter century, that most of my students feel the same way. What’s more, West’s off-the-cuff riffs and rants, spoken into a microphone and later transcribed to page, lack the discipline of the written word. West’s rhetorical genius is undeniable, but there are limits on what speaking can do for someone trying to wrestle angels or battle demons to the page. This is no biased preference for the written word over the spoken; I am far from a champion of a Eurocentric paradigm of literacy. This is about scholar versus talker. Improvisational speaking bears its wonders: the emergence on the spot of turns of thought and pathways of insight one hadn’t planned, and the rapturous discovery, in front of a live audience, of meanings that usually lie buried beneath the rubble of formal restrictions and literary conventions. Yet West’s inability to write is hugely confining. For scholars, there is a depth that can only be tapped through the rigorous reworking of the same sentences until the meaning comes clean—or as clean as one can make it.
Kevin Mazur / WireImage
West has criticized progressives for being tempted by fame and power. But as this appearance with Jay Z in 2010 demonstrates, he is far from immune to the allure of celebrity.
The ecstasies of the spoken word, when scholarship is at stake, leave the deep reader and the long listener hungry for more. Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.
Obama welcomed West’s support because he is a juggernaut of the academy and an intellectual icon among the black masses.
West admires the Socratic process of questioning ideas and practices in fruitful dialogue, and while that may elicit thoughts he yearned to express anyhow, he’s at the mercy of his interlocutors. Thus when West inveighs, stampedes, and kvetches, he gets on a roll that might be amplified in conversation but arrested in print. It’s not a matter of skillful editing, either, so that the verbal repetition and set pieces that orators depend on get clipped and swept aside with the redactor’s broom. It’s the conceptual framework that suffers in translating what’s spoken to what’s written, since writing is about contrived naturalness: rigging the system of meaning to turn out the way you want, and making it look normal and inevitable in the process.
An essential tenet of West’s arguments, and the centerpiece of his public identity, is his belief about prophets, and more important, his claim to be one. West’s follow-up to Prophesy Deliverance! was Prophetic Fragments, a 1988 collection of essays, lectures, and speeches. Two more volumes followed in 1993: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times and Prophetic Reflections. “I am a prophetic Christian freedom fighter,” West wrote in one essay, adding in his memoir, “I see my role as ... someone who feels both a Socratic and prophetic calling.”
Prophets in the Judeo-Christian tradition draw on divine inspiration to speak God’s words on earth. They are called by God to advocate for the poor and vulnerable while decrying unrighteousness and battling injustice. Among black Americans, prophecy is often rooted in religious stories of overcoming oppression while influencing the moral vision of social activists. Black prophets are highly esteemed because they symbolize black resistance to white supremacy, stoke insurgence against the suppression of our freedom, inspire combat against social and political oppression, and risk their lives in the service of their people and the nation’s ideals. They remind us of the full measure of God’s love for the weak and unprotected, especially in an era when prophecy has been co-opted, turned into a bland cultural commodity, and marketed as the basis for enterprising exploits of major corporations or for political gain.
We see this phenomenon each year during the birthday celebration for Martin Luther King Jr., one of the greatest figures in both black and U.S. history, and someone who is revered as a prophet. Fast food corporations trumpet King’s message of togetherness and yet often fail to pay a living wage to their workers, even as conservative politicians pay homage to King’s memory while implementing voter ID laws that imperil the franchise for millions of black citizens. The same culture that killed King now seeks to kill contemporary expressions of his prophetic itinerary, by portraying today’s activists, such as those found in #BlackLivesMatter and the movement to end police brutality, as the moral opposites of his social vision and ’60s-era nonviolent protest. The argument over who and what is prophetic has rarely been more heated in black culture than it is now.
The model of the charismatic black male leader has come in for deserved drubbing since it overlooks the contributions of women and children that often went unheralded in the civil rights movement and earlier black freedom struggles. Queer activists sparked the #BlackLivesMatter movement, underscoring the unacknowledged sacrifice of black folk who are confined to the closets and corners of black existence. Even those who enjoy a direct relationship to King and to Malcolm X haven’t escaped scrutiny. Louis Farrakhan is faulted (and praised) for his distance from Malcolm’s racial politics, and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have been pilloried for lacking King’s gravitas and grace. The truth of those assessments is not as important as the value of the comparison: It holds would-be prophets to account for standards of achievement both noble and nostalgic, real and imagined.
Despite the profusion of prophecy in his texts and talks, West has never bothered to tell us in rich detail what makes a person a prophet. He doesn’t offer a theory of prophets so much as announce their virtues and functions while grieving over their lost art and practice. In Black Prophetic Fire, West offers a sweeping assessment of contemporary black life: “Black people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others,” he wrote. “Black people once had a strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice.” Today, however, “Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of wealth, health, and status. ... [They] engage in the petty practice of chasing dollars.”
West offers no empirical proof for these claims; like so much of his recent work there are assertions without sustained and compelling arguments, and certainly no polls or studies that prove the increase in black materialism, or individualism, or the decline in black prophetic beliefs and behavior. West’s failure to carefully chart the history and ethical arc of prophecy leads him to wild overstatement. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of pornography, West may not seek to define a prophet, but he knows one when he sees one, and quite often, they sound just like him. This limp understanding of prophecy plays to his advantage because he can bless or dismiss prophets without answering how we determine who prophets are, who gets to say so, how they are different from social critics, to whom they answer, if they have standing in religious communities, or if God calls them.
West has never given us detailed comparative analyses of prophets in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Zoroastrianism, nor has he distinguished between major and minor prophets. He hasn’t explored the differences between social and political prophecy; examined the fruitful connections between the biblical gift of prophecy and its cultural determinants; or linked his understanding of prophecy to secular expressions of the prophetic urge found in New Left radicalism, for example, which led to Jack Newfield’s notable analysis of the movement in A Prophetic Minority. (To be fair, Newfield didn’t spend a great deal of time exploring prophecy either; but then he didn’t fancy himself a prophet like West, nor did he viciously lambast those who fall short of his expectations or standards.)
What makes West a prophet? Is it his willingness to call out corporate elites and assail the purveyors of injustice and inequality? The actor Russell Brand does that in his book Revolution. Is he a prophet? Is it West’s self-identification with the poor? Tupac Shakur had that on lock. Should we deem him a prophet? Is it West’s self-styled resistance to police brutality, evidenced by his occasional willingness to get arrested in highly staged and camera-ready gestures of civil disobedience, such as in Ferguson last fall? West sees King as a prophet, but Jackson and Sharpton, who have also courted arrest in public fashion, are “ontologically addicted to the camera,” according to West. King used cameras to gain attention for the movement, a fact West fails to mention in his attacks on Jackson, “the head house Negro on the Clinton plantation,” and Sharpton, “the head house Negro on the Obama plantation.”
The hypocrisy in such claims is acute: West likewise hungers for the studio, and conspicuously so. There he is on CNN, extolling his prophetic pedigree. There he is on MSNBC, discussing his arrest in Ferguson while footage of the event rolls. There he is in the recording booth making not spoken word or hip-hop, but a grimly earnest sonic hybrid of speech and music, and saying, “If I can reach one young person with a message embedded in a sound that stirs his or her soul, then I have not labored in vain.” There he is in The Matrix sequels, doing something he’s become tragicomically good at—playing an unintentional caricature of his identity.
West most closely identifies with a black prophetic tradition that has deep roots in the church. But ordained ministers, and especially pastors, must give account to the congregations or denominations that offer them institutional support and the legitimacy to prophesize. They may face severe consequences—including excommunication, censorship, being defrocked, or even expelled from their parishes—for their acts. The words and prophetic actions of these brave souls impact their ministerial standing and their vocation. West faces no such penalty for his pretense to Christian prophecy.
West might argue that not being ordained leaves him free to act on his prophetic instincts and even disagree with the church on social matters. Thus he avoids the negative consequences of ordination while remaining spiritually anchored. That’s fine if you’re a run-of-the-mill Christian, but there is, and should be, a higher standard for prophets. True prophets embrace religious authority and bravely stand up to it in the name of a higher power. The effort to escape responsibility should sound an alarm for those who hold West’s views about how prophets should behave. One need not be Martin Luther King to qualify as a prophet. But when you claim to be a prophet, you are expected, as the classic gospel song goes, to live the life you sing about in your song.
As an ordained minister and professor, I know the difference between the professorate and the pastorate, between prophets and scholars. When I utter progressive beliefs about equal rights for women or queer folk as a professor, I am sometimes lauded. When I was a church pastor—not a prophet, something I have never claimed to be—the same sermon that garnered praise from progressive scholars earned me scorn from church officials and members and even cost me a pastorate when I tried to put my beliefs into action and ordain women as deacons.
As a freelancing, itinerant, nonordained, self-anointed prophet, West has only to answer to himself. That may symbolize a grand resistance to institutional authority, but it’s also a failure to acknowledge the institutional responsibilities that religious prophets bear. Most ministers are clerics attending to the needs of the local parish. Only a select few are cut from prophetic cloth. Yet nearly all the religious figures we recognize as prophets—Adam Clayton Powell Jr., King, Jackson, Sharpton—were ordained as ministers. Powell and King were pastors of local churches as well. To be sure, there are prophets who are not ministers or religious figures—especially women whose path to the ministry has been blocked by sexist theologies—but most of them have ties to organizations or institutions that hold them accountable.
West is still a Man of Ideas, but those ideas today are a vain and unimaginative repackaging of his earlier hits.
West has a measure of responsibility as a professor, but he enjoys far greater freedom than most ministers or prophets. Professors have a lot of flexibility in teaching classes, advising students, writing books, and speaking their minds without worrying that a deacon board will censor them or trustees will boot them out. Prophets, as a rule, don’t have tenure. West gets the benefits of the association with prophecy while bearing none of its burdens. By refusing to take up the cross he urges prophetic Christians to carry, West is preaching courage while seeking to avoid reprisal or suffering. Playing it safe means that West doesn’t qualify for the prophetic role he espouses.
West’s lack of understanding of the prophetic tradition is perhaps most evident in his criticism of Sharpton and Jackson. He berates them for their appetite for access to power, their desire for insider status. Even if we concede for the moment that this is true, it isn’t a failure of their prophecy but of West’s ability to distinguish between kinds of prophets. In his 1995 book, The Preacher King, Duke Divinity School Professor Richard Lischer noted that in ancient Israel, the central prophet moved within the power structure, reminding the people of their covenant with God and also consulting kings on military matters and issues of national significance. Peripheral prophets were outsiders who embraced the poor, criticized the monarchy, and opposed war.
West ignores these variations, which results in an idealized, and deeply flawed, portrait of King as a peripheral prophet who was only useful when he hugged the margin. But that, Lischer argued, is a distorted rendering of King’s prophetic profile:
As a central prophet, Martin Luther King had been deeply involved with the Johnson administration’s efforts to pass civil rights legislation. Beginning already in the Eisenhower administration and increasing steadily throughout the turbulent Kennedy years, he had been regularly consulted on matters of interest to the Negro in America. After the March on Washington, Kennedy had scrambled to align himself with King’s beautifully articulated ideals. In some of Lyndon Johnson’s early civil rights speeches, King was gratified to hear echoes of his own ideas. No black leader had ever enjoyed comparable access to the Oval Office and the power it represented.
King moved from central to peripheral prophet in his last few years with an emphasis on economic justice and antiwar activism—views he grew into as he wrestled with his conscience, his staff, and the folk to whom he was accountable. But West’s insistence that only peripheral prophets are genuine and powerful is undercut by the legislation King helped to pass as a central prophet: the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. King was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision. When West begrudges Sharpton his closeness to Obama, he ignores the fact that King had similar access.
Sharpton and Jackson moved in the opposite prophetic direction of King. While King kissed the periphery with courageous vigor after enjoying his role as a central prophet, Jackson, and especially Sharpton, started on the periphery before coming into their own on the inside. Jackson’s transition was smoothed by the gulf left by King’s assassination, and while forging alliances with other outsiders on the black left, he easily adapted to the role of the inside-outsider who identified with the downcast while making his way to the heart of the Democratic Party.
Sharpton, lacking the leeway that derives from a leader’s violent death, had instead to kill his persona; the rabble-rousing and inflammatory style of his early days is gone. West remains an elite academic and can hardly be said to have ever been a true outsider, given his position in the academic elite and the upper reaches of the economy, but he hungers to be seen as rebellious. In truth, West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies.
Leon Wieseltier famously derided West’s work as “almost completely worthless” in these pages 20 years ago. And although I strongly disagree with Wieseltier’s views of West’s early works, it would be fitting for West to downsize his ambition and accept his role as a public intellectual, social gadfly, or merely a paid pest. There’s nobility in such roles, and one need not dress up one’s intellectual vocation as a prophetic one. West may draw on prophetic insight; he may look up to prophets on the front lines; and he may even employ prophetic vocabularies of social dissent. But none of that makes him a prophet. One of West’s heroes, Malcolm X, said that just because a cat has kittens in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits. That’s what philosophers call a category mistake.
If West’s harangues against Obama are not the words of a prophet, then how do we account for his extravagant excoriations? They might be explained with a bit of the moral psychology West likes to apply to the president. West said in 2011 that “my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” because as a biracial child growing up in a white world, “he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin.” West said that when Obama “meets an independent black brother, it is frightening.” Yet Obama wasn’t too frightened to confront West. According to Jonathan Alter’s 2013 book, The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies, at the 2010 National Urban League convention, Obama barked at West, “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?” Other foul words were uttered, West added, and Obama “cussed me out.” A photo of the exchange exists: West frozen like a dear brother in the headlights as he smiled broadly and stood speechless.
The irony is that, as highly charged as his criticism has become, West is, in some ways, not that different from Obama. The president has long wished to be the grand architect of bipartisanship, the conciliator of left and right, the bridge between conservatives and liberals. West used to fancy himself a similar figure; at least he did when he was riding high on best-seller lists as a progressive icon. West sought to account for the suffering of black America by steering between the arguments of conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists. He thought it was important to acknowledge self-inflicted injuries as well as dehumanizing forces. As Stephen Steinberg, a sociologist at Queens College, has argued, West set himself up as “the voice of reason and moderation between liberals and conservatives,” as the “mediator between ideological extremes.” Obama has similarly argued that black folk must cultivate moral excellence at home and in the community even as he admits the government must help fight black suffering.
West’s prescription for what ails black folk—and a big part of Obama’s plan, too—involves a personal and behavioral dimension beyond social or political change. For West, the cure is a politics of conversion fueled by a strong love ethic. “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care,” West wrote in Race Matters. “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 of others.” Obama believes the blessed should care for the unfortunate, a hallmark of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative. West and Obama both advocate intervention for our most vulnerable citizens, but while West focuses on combating market forces that “edge out nonmarket values—love, care, service to others—handed down by preceding generations,” Obama, as Alter contends, is more practical, offering Pell grants; stimulus money that saved the jobs of hundreds of thousands of black state and local workers; the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, which reduced the disparity of sentences for powdered and crack cocaine; the extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which kept millions of working poor blacks from sliding into poverty; and the extension of unemployment insurance and food stamps, which helped millions of blacks.
Associated Press / Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Barack Obama confronted West about his criticisms at the 2010 National Urban League convention: “I’m not progressive? What kind of shit is this?”
The odd thing is that Obama talks right—chiding personal irresponsibility in a way that presumes the pathology of many black families and neighborhoods—but veers left in his public policy. West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right in his notion of nihilism and the factors that might reduce its peril. In Race Matters, West argued that the spiritual malady of “nihilism” is the greatest threat to black America—not racism, not class inequality, not material hardship or poverty or hyperincarceration. Steinberg rightly argues that it “takes hairsplitting distinctions, that do not bear close scrutiny, to maintain that West’s view of nihilism is different from the conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Steinberg says that despite “frequent caveats, West has succeeded in shifting the focus of blame onto the black community. The affliction is theirs—something we shall call ‘nihilism.’” West did as much to slam the poor with his stylish, postmodern update of ghetto pathology and blame-the-victim reasoning as any conservative thinker. He gave the notion ideological cover because it got a sexy upgrade from a prominent leftist. As much as West berates Obama’s neglect of the poor, his own writing brought them harsher visibility than they deserved.
The conservative underpinnings of West’s views on nihilism make his confrontations with progressives like Melissa Harris-Perry, a Wake Forest professor and MSNBC host whom he helped to recruit to Princeton in 2006, curious to say the least. The conflict with her stemmed from an essay Harris-Perry wrote in 2008 for The Root accusing Tavis Smiley of throwing “a temper tantrum” because Obama had declined to attend his State of the Black Union conference in New Orleans that year. In the article, Harris-Perry also jabbed at West for levying the same criticism at Obama for skipping the event in 2007. Smiley, West, and their supporters, she wrote, had created a “false, racial litmus test” for Obama, one that he failed simply by not showing up.
Harris-Perry again attacked West in 2011 in The Nation, decrying his “self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness.” West, she wrote, “offers thin criticism of President Obama and stunning insight into the delicate ego of the self-appointed black leadership class that has been largely supplanted in recent years.” West fired back in a 2012 Diverse magazine interview, saying, “I have a love for the sister, but she is a liar, and I hate lying.” West called Harris-Perry “the momentary darling of liberals,” but he “pray[ed] for her because she’s in over her head. She’s a fake and fraud.” Harris-Perry told Diverse that she left Princeton for Tulane in 2011 after some members of the African American studies department blocked her promotion to full professor.
If West is no prophet but instead a dynamic and once-indispensable social critic, neither is his nastiness the echo of divine disfavor from on high. In a 2014 interview on HuffPost Live, Morehouse College Professor Marc Lamont Hill challenged West about his attacks on his fellow black progressives. West compared himself to biblical prophets Jeremiah and Amos, contending there is “a certain intensity to prophetic language that hits deep and seems to be unfair, but is coming from a place of such righteous indignation.” Not content to be in league with mere prophets, West compared himself with Christ, with those who disagreed with him cast in the role of the Lord’s unprincipled opponents. “If we could hear what Jesus was saying when he ran out the money changers in the temple, it was not polite discourse.”
If this isn’t the height of self-righteousness, it is the depth of delusion and exegetical corruption—isolating and then interpreting a text to sanctify his scurrilous views. But West’s broadsides lack a crucial element. Lischer argued that late in his career King, too, “began to give full vent to his rage.” But unlike West, King’s “was the holy rage of the prophetic tradition, and not the resentment or vengefulness of his nationalist critics, to which he lent his voice. His prophetic forebears, as it were, taught him how to get mad, what themes to press, and what language to use.”
In his callous disregard for plural visions of truth, West, like the prophet Elijah, retreats into a deluded and self-important belief in his singular and exclusive rightness. But God reminded Elijah that his prophetic exclamations were wrong. He instructed him to rest and recognize that he wasn’t the only one left who believed in God or bore witness to the truth. But these words mean nothing to West, who, after all, isn’t a prophet. He cannot retreat, and he relentlessly declares his humility to shield himself from the prophet’s duty of pitiless self-inventory.
West and I participated in several State of the Black Union meetings, as well as a 2010 roundtable in Chicago to address the black agenda. I expressed love for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back, arguing that Obama the president is Pharaoh, not Moses: a politician, not a liberator. Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama, a posture that didn’t mirror West’s black-or-white views—nor satisfy the Obama administration’s expectation of unqualified support.
In The Center Holds, Alter described a meeting Obama held with prominent black figures in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, during which radio host Tom Joyner “began to mix it up with the author Michael Eric Dyson, who wanted the administration to target its efforts more on particular black needs.” Alter wrote, “Obama jumped in to say he had no problem with Dyson or anyone else disagreeing with him about how to help the needy,” but that he got upset with “critics who ‘question my blackness and my commitment to blacks.’” I said nothing to the president that day that I hadn’t said many times over the years.
If West’s accusation that some progressives are Obama apologists rings false, his finding fault in those who crave access is downright laughable. That’s because West shamelessly flaunts his proximity to the rich and famous and takes pride in knowing there are powerful people who love and admire him. It’s all there in West’s memoir, Brother West. “It was the summer of 1988, and we were all gathered around the grand piano at Carly Simon’s home on Martha’s Vineyard,” he writes. The “we” includes Simon, West, and the opera singer Kathleen Battle, his girlfriend at the time. West got to meet other famous people because of Battle. “Roberta Flack invited us to her apartment at the Dakota,” and Battle “introduced me to two fabulous maestros: the inimitable James Levine ... and the famous conductor Christoph von Dohnányi.” Then there’s the time in 1998 that Warren Beatty phoned West and asked if he could take a look at a film he’d just made. “When the film was over, Warren turned to me and asked the $64,000 question, ‘Should I release it?’ I didn’t hesitate. ‘Absolutely,’ I said. ‘It’s a fascinating critique of capitalism and market-driven politics. I think ... [it] needs to be seen.’” Thus we have West to thank for Beatty’s political comedy, Bulworth. After giving the actor-director the green light, West said he, Beatty, and their filmmates for the night, Norman Mailer and his wife, “talked our heads off till three in the morning.”
And then there’s music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, whom West met after the star’s attorney—“my dear friend Johnnie Cochran Jr.”—called him and said, “Corn, Sean is in deep trouble,” asking West to come to court with Combs for moral support during his trial for gun possession and bribery. There’s the time he met the hip-hop artist Snoop Dogg on a flight from Chicago to Houston. “I spotted Snoop Dogg and, just like that, announced publicly, ‘Lyrical genius on the plane!’” Or the time he hung out with Prince, who “had graciously invited me to his Bel Air mansion.” West said he was approached at Prince’s home “by a beautiful Latina, who was overflowing with intellectual passion,” and at “evening’s end, I told the sweet lady that it was a delight” as “Salma Hayek went her way and I went mine.”
There are literally pages and pages of illustrious name-dropping in Brother West, a book that owes its subtitle, Living and Loving Out Loud, to another boldface name—Bob Dylan. West was in an airport when Dylan’s drummer approached him and said that the legendary artist loved and respected West. The drummer relayed something Dylan said about the professor: “‘Cornel West,’ said Dylan, ‘is a man who lives his life out loud.’”
Perhaps West despises the access of Sharpton and others to Obama because, unlike them, he has heroically resisted such impulses and invitations. But he couldn’t hush his enthusiasm when another president, Bill Clinton, invited him to the White House after the publication of Race Matters. West said Clinton brought him to the Oval Office, “eager to engage in serious intellectual conversation about culture and politics.” Writing of Clinton, West says:
The brother was absolutely brilliant and I was having a ball. When I looked at my watch, though, I saw it was far into the middle of the night. We had been at it for hours. I realized I had an early morning flight back to New Jersey to teach at Princeton and needed just a little nod of sleep. But he was as fresh as ever. I remember thinking to myself—Does this brother have a job?—when I realized—He’s the president of the United States! I did leave, but only after another hour of conversation.
West offers himself a benefit that he refuses to extend to others: He can go to the White House without becoming a presidential apologist or losing his prophetic cool. He can spend an evening with the president, the first of many such evenings, without selling his soul. West can delight in meeting Clinton, with the sudden burst of recognition that he’s in the presence of the president of the United States!—the italicized enthusiasm is all his! West’s hypocrisy in the matter is radiant;it shines through his belief that only he can resist the siren call of presidential access and retain his “black card” and his three-piece prophet’s robe of honor.
West’s attacks on me were a bleak forfeiture of 30 years of friendship; it was the repudiation of fond collegiality and intellectual companionship, of political camaraderie and joined social struggle. I was a mentee and, according to West, who was kind enough to write a blurb for one of my books, “a rare kind of genius with organic links to our beloved street brothers and sisters.” But I had somehow undergone a transformation in West’s mind: I was an Obama stooge who had forsaken the poor. In November 2012, West, friend and mentor, one of the three men whose name is on my Princeton doctoral dissertation, let me have it in the national media.
It was during an appearance with Tavis Smiley on Democracy Now, shortly after Obama’s reelection. “I love Brother Mike Dyson,” West said. “But we’re living in a society where everybody is up for sale. Everything is up for sale. And he and Brother Sharpton and Sister Melissa and others, they have sold their souls for a mess of Obama pottage. And we invite them back to the black prophetic tradition after Obama leaves. But at the moment, they want insider access, and they want to tell those kinds of lies. They want to turn their back to poor and working people. And it’s a sad thing to see them as apologists for the Obama administration in that way, given the kind of critical background that all of them have had at some point.”
West was just warming up. After a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the 1963 March on Washington on the National Mall, a celebration Sharpton led and at which I spoke, West argued that Martin Luther King Jr. “would’ve been turning over in his grave” at Sharpton’s “coronation” as the “bona fide house negro of the Obama plantation,” supported by “the Michael Dysons and others who’ve really prostituted themselves intellectually in a very, very ugly and vicious way.” And recently, while promoting Black Prophetic Fire, West argued “the Sharptons, the Melissa Harris-Perrys, and the Michael Eric Dysons ... end up being these cheerleaders and bootlickers for the President, and I think it’s a disgrace when it comes to the black prophetic tradition of Malcolm and Martin.”
Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
West, speaking at a 2014 rally, is renowned for an oratorical style that combines elements of jazz improvisation and the cadences of a gospel preacher.
West’s aggressions brought me great sorrow. In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him: that he was consumed with jealousy of Obama, that he simply couldn’t abide the rise of a figure who eclipsed most other black personalities for the time being and who, for many, even competed with King for recognition as the “greatest black man in American history.” I still don’t buy those theories, but I do think West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational—it’s a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain. It is sad to think that West aimed at me because my criticism failed to comport with his shrill and manic dispute with the president; our lost friendship is the collateral damage of his war on Obama.
In his anger toward me I was forced, for the first time, to entertain seriously the wild accusations levied against him.
West has sacrificed friendships and cut ties with former comrades because he insists that only outright denunciation of Obama will do. It is a colossal loss for such a gifted man to surrender to unheroic truculence: If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then the loss of a brilliant black mind is more terrible, more wasteful. At precisely the moment when we could use the old West’s formidable analytical skills to grapple with the myriad polarities that glut the political horizon, the new West, already in the clutches of a fateful denouement, has instead sought the empty solace of emotional catharsis.
If West was once Tyson in his glory, he is Tyson, too, in his infamy. Once great, once dominant, once feared, he is now a faint echo of himself. Like Iron Mike, West is given to biting our ears with personal attacks rather than bending our minds with fresh and powerful scholarship. Like Tyson, he is given to making cameos—in West’s case, appearing as himself in scripted social unrest, or playing a prophet on television in the latest protest. He has squandered his intellectual gift in exchange for celebrity. He’s grown flabby with disinterest in the work needed to stay aloft: the readiness to read, think, and recast thought in the crucible of written words.
West’s memoir offers a poignant and honest accounting of his relationship with women, and by extension, his relationship with Obama, who was, for a time, the object of West’s profound political affection:
Because I’ve never been an advocate of psychotherapy as a path to self- understanding. . . . I’ve avoided such therapy because I worry about how it might exacerbate narcissistic tendencies. . . . I’m not sure I know myself well enough to share my whole self with others. This, in part, might explain my volatile relationships with women. One might argue that because I don’t know myself, the more time I spend with a woman, the more various parts of myself emerge—parts that are, in fact, foreign to me. In short, my whole self surfaces, and it is precisely my whole self that strikes me as a stranger. To maintain a long-term and long-lasting bond with a woman may require the kind of soul-sharing or self-sharing that’s beyond my capability.
West’s fears of his narcissistic tendencies seem to have come true in his fight with President Obama. Hedges also used the language of the jilted lover in describing West, noting that he “nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated, and betrayed.” West admitted to Hedges in their interview that he went “ballistic” about Obama because he had been “thoroughly misled”; or, put differently, he was crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him.
West’s narcissism in this matter is not exemplified by his sense of being jilted but in the way he has personalized his grief. And the longer West has nursed his resentment, the more he has revealed parts of himself that even he may not understand or be able to explain, since political disappointment in a politician’s behavior rarely provokes such torrents of passion, such protracted, dastardly, and sadly, such self-destructive hate. The volatility that West said roils his personal relations may also mar his political ones. Now he lumbers into his future, punch-drunk from too many fights unwisely undertaken, facing a cruel reality: His greatest opponent isn’t Obama, Sharpton, Harris-Perry, or me. It is the ghost of a self that spits at him from his own mirror.
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How Liberals' Attacks on Cornel West Expose Their Political Bankruptcy
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Cornel West supports the work of Black Arts Movement poet Marvin X, who says, "I appreciate the support of a revolutionary brother Cornel because he's not afraid to tell the truth about Pharaoh."
The Ghosts of Obama’s Victims: How Liberals’ Attacks on Cornel West Expose Their Political Bankruptcy
This article is published in Medium.In her 1987 autobiography, Assata Shakur characterized liberalism as a politically and morally bankrupt ideology, writing
I have never really understood exactly what a ‘liberal’ is, since I have heard ‘liberals’ express every conceivable opinion on every conceivable subject. As far as I can tell, you have the extreme right, who are fascist racist capitalist dogs like Ronald Reagan, who come right out and let you know where they’re coming from. And on the opposite end, you have the left, who are supposed to be committed to justice, equality, and human rights. And somewhere between those two points is the liberal.Liberals’ constant attacks on Cornel West—one of the most important leaders in the US anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and economic, social, and environmental justice movements of today—serve as a reminder as to just how accurate Assata was in her assessment, made almost three decades ago. The Democratic commentariat seem to take pleasure in heaping scorn on the principled iconoclast, never failing to include as a header image on their articles a photo of the professor scowling, in a cheap attempt to portray the amiable, peace-seeking public intellectual as angry and impetuous.
As far as I’m concerned, ‘liberal’ is the most meaningless word in the dictionary.
In the latest of such shameless attacks, MSNBC analyst and avowed Obama defender Michael Eric Dyson published a 9,600-word article excoriating Dr. West, or, rather, “The Ghost of Cornel West.”Instead of attacking white supremacy, the Georgetown University professor invested a great deal of time and energy in carrying out a public attack on a leading voice in today’s civil rights struggle.
Misrepresenting Obama
In a parenthetical statement in the essay, Dyson recalls a private discussion he had with Obama in the White House. Later on, he writes that, “Throughout his presidency I have offered what I consider principled support and sustained criticism of Obama,” and states he has “expressed love for Obama and criticized him for not always loving us back.” A quick look at the White House visitor records helps paint a picture of this cozy relationship.Dyson’s affection for Obama certainly shines through the work; even the scantest of criticisms is hard to come by. In perhaps the most ludicrous, topsy-turvy moment in the extended work, Dyson claims “Obama talks right … but veers left public policy,” whereas “West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right.” In the real world, the exact contrary is true: Obama talks center-right and veers decidedly right on policy. Obama is and has always been a conservative. The Obama the Conservative project meticulously detailed his right-wing policies for years.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows that Cornel West is absolutely correct in his insistence that Obama “posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency.” This presidency is also built upon the expansion of murderous imperialism in the Middle East, upon the adoption of neoliberal trade agreements like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (often described as “NAFTA on steroids”), upon the mass deportation and inhumane and illegal internment of millions of Latin@ immigrants and refugees, upon the privatization of prisons, upon the McCarthyist crackdown on whistleblowers, and more.
According to Dyson, West “derides” Obama as a “neoliberal opportunist.” This is not derision. This is an objective fact. Obama is a neoliberal through and through. He has made it his singular mission to pass the TPP and gut regulatory and labor laws, using secretive, anti-democratic methods in order to do so.
In the words of Chris Hedges
The Democratic Party in Europe would be a far-right party. It’s pro-war, it’s anti-union, it’s anti-civil liberties. I mean, Obama’s assault on civil liberties is worse than Bush. It’s an enemy of the press. It’s used the Espionage Act to shut down whistle-blowers, which are the lifeblood of a free press. It has assassinated American citizens. I mean, at what point do you say enough?Obama’s actions are what matter, not his rhetoric. Dyson concedes this, averring that it “is a sad truth that most politicians are serial rhetorical lovers and promiscuous ideological mates.” And, yet, Dyson dabbles mostly in rhetoric, utterly failing to engage in these serious political concerns.
In the overture to the protracted piece, Dyson claims he is “just as critical of the president as” West, yet proof of such an assertion is certainly hard to come by—and he spends the next several thousand words detailing why exactly the opposite is true.
Defending Corporate Civil Rights Figures
While shielding Obama from West’s criticisms, Dyson elevates corporate civil rights figures Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, among others. The two men’s names appear constantly (Sharpton 16 times and Jackson eight).Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford describes Al Sharpton as “a crook who is always for sale,” with strident “amorality and infinite capacity for corruption.” Sharpton, Ford says, is a “celebrity locked in the embrace of the rich and powerful.”
Sharpton’s ostensible civil rights organization the National Action Network is sponsored by the world’s largest corporations, including Walmart, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, AT&T, Verizon, and more. He clearly seeks real, systemic change and justice with those kinds of progressive backers.
Jackson is a reactionary pro-imperialist proponent of “black capitalism” who destroyed the Rainbow Coalition, co-opting its legacy as an internationalist, multi-cultural revolutionary organization created by the socialist Black Panthers and turning it into a neoliberal nationalist “coalition.”
Young black Americans recognize that Sharpton and Jackson are not fighters for liberation. When the two reactionary public figures tried to exploit the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Ferguson and elsewhere, they were booed off stage. Cornel West, however, unlike these corrupt corporate celebrities, has been at the forefront of the Black Lives Matter movement, getting arrested at demonstrations, constantly attending and speaking at rallies, tirelessly working from the bottom up, in true grassroots fashion.
Dyson essentially writes off the import of these actions as mere “highly staged and camera-ready gestures.” In Dyson’s view, West “hungers for the studio, and conspicuously so.” It is implied that his civil disobedience is part of a façade for attention. Dyson even admits he, at least for a time, entertained the preposterous notion that West is motivated to do so because he is “consumed with jealousy of Obama” and firmly maintains that “West’s deep loathing of Obama draws on some profoundly personal energy that is ultimately irrational.” In a similarly superficial moment, Dyson speculates that West may “hate” Obama because he was unable to get a ticket to the president’s inauguration.
For starters, the idea that West loathes Obama is incredibly misguided. West is the polar opposite of a hate-filled person; he constantly speaks of love, and firmly opposes Obama’s reactionary policies, not his being. In a 2014 interview on Democracy Now, West in fact remarked of Obama, “when I say when I love the brother, it means we have to tell the truth about him.”
The fact that West does not hold any kind of deep hatred of Obama aside, this is the kind of puerile argument liberals regularly construct to defend their untenable positions. They personalize critiques of political figures, turning political argumentation into apolitical beauty pageants that are fueled on “irrational personal energy,” not substantive material concerns about existing systems of oppression.
Ignoring the Political for the Personal
Dyson makes no serious critiques of West’s actual political positions. His entire essay reads primarily as a very long-winded ad hominem (which is all the more ironic considering Dyson accuses West of “biting our ears with personal attacks”). Dyson focuses almost entirely on how West speaks and presents himself, but largely glosses over West’s political criticisms of society.He harshly writes “West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies,” yet fails to enunciate why this is purportedly the case. He furthermore claims West has become “an unintentional caricature of his identity” and accuses the scholar of “delusion and exegetical corruption.”
Borrowing from what one might hear in a high school breakup scene in a John Hughes film, Dyson pillories West for being “crushed that Obama had ideologically cheated on him”—as if it were a petty thing to be frustrated at a president who campaigned on promises of progressive “change” but turned out to be just another neoliberal warmonger.
Much of the article is devoted to dissecting West’s characterization of himself as a prophet, which one gets the impression is overstated. Dyson also writes extensively about “West’s diminished scholarly output” and what he feels to be a “paucity of serious and fresh intellectual work,” then proceeding to conflate these criticisms with West’s activism and criticisms of the status quo, implying the latter are equally “vain and unimaginative.” In a problematic selective reading of West’s work, Dyson accuses the professor of propagating a “conservative view of ghetto culture as deeply pathological, and as the chief source of the problems that beset African Americans.” Again, however, he does not spend a single sentence acknowledging West’s politics. No mention whatsoever is made of West’s work on Marxism, nor is his involvement with the Democratic Socialists of America ever brought up.
Absent from the essay—in spite of its prolixity—is any attempt to engage with, let alone refute, West’s critiques of Obama and the US political establishment. Dyson does raise warranted concerns about gaps in West’s scholarship, noting, for instance, that the professor failed to clearly define what exactly makes a person a prophet, yet, to a large extent, Dyson avoids the political. He illustrates the liberal tendency to emphasize that the personal is political to such a degree that the non-personal, systemic political is ignored.
Dyson even goes so far as to write off West’s critiques of Obama as “a species of antipathy that no political difference could ever explain.” Instead of engaging in the political, Dyson reduces it to a mere “shrill and manic dispute.” He classifies West’s denunciation of Obama as the sign of “the loss of a brilliant black mind,” as if criticizing a president who won an election thanks to the financial backing of some of the world’s most powerful banks and corporations were only something a “maniac” would do.
In a bout of full liberalism, Dyson concludes the essay averring that West’s problem ultimately lies with his own self, not with any politician or political system. This is the kind of vacuous political perspective that dominates the intelligentsia today.
One wishes that Dyson would get as worked up about the victims of Obama’s drone war, which Chomsky calls “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”; about Obama’s steadfast support for Israel during its summer 2014 massacre of over 2,300 Gazans, in which it intentionally targeted civilians; about Obama’s expansion of the war in and occupation of Afghanistan, which he promised countless times he would end by 2014; or about Obama’s mass deportations of over two million people—to name just a few of his positively reactionary policies—as he is about West’s supposed hatred of Obama.
The fact of the matter is West’s heated criticisms of Obama are the logical result of a morally consistent human being seeing the horrors for which the Obama administration has been responsible. The problem does not lie with West’s admittedly provocative denunciations of Obama, but rather with the fact that more self-identifying progressives are not standing up for their values and opposing their government’s obscene crimes.
Siding with Larry Summers, the ‘Toxic Colonialist’
In his criticisms of West, it should be pointed out that Dyson favorably cites neoliberal economist Lawrence Summers, former Chief Economist at the World Bank and President of Harvard University, a figure who has occupied many important positions in the Clinton and Obama administrations and has a long history frequenting the corporate elevator and revolving doors between powerful economic and political institutions, including hedge funds like D. E. Shaw & Co. Summers, who has come under attack for blatant misogyny, is the kind of liberal who helped former Soviet countries privatize their economies—leading to enormous increases in poverty—and oversaw the deregulation of the US financial system.Summers, on whose authority Dyson relies without trepidation, signed an internal World Bank memo in 1991 that called for Western countries to dump toxic waste in the Global South, because, in his view, from a capitalist economics perspective, the value of the lives of people in Africa, Asia, and more is less than the value of the lives of people in North America and Europe. Summers’ defense of “toxic colonialism” was of little importance to liberals like Obama himself, who relied on the former World Bank economist as the White House United States National Economic Council and the principle economic decision-maker during the Great Recession.
The ultimate irony lies in the sharp contrast between Summers’ belief that (presumably white) Western lives are more valuable than black and brown ones in the so-called Third World and Cornel West’s antithetical adamant insistence that all lives are equal. In his condemnation of killer drone strikes, West often implores listeners to consider whether they truly do consider all lives to be equal, whether they truly care about the young Pakistani children killed in Obama’s drone program—which Amnesty International has accused of war crimes.
Whitewashing MLK
As is common among the liberal intelligentsia, Dyson also exploits the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. in order to defend and lionize the war criminal (according to Amnesty International) Obama.The irony is that many of the criticisms Dyson levies against West were equally true for MLK—a “prophetic” leader who, like West, was not a “moderate” toer of the party line, but was rather a radical, a relentless critic of not just racism but also of imperialism and capitalism, someone who alienated many supposed allies in his indefatigable and intersectional quest for justice.
Dyson predictably whitewashes MLK’s radical legacy, claiming the civil rights icon “was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision”—that is to say, when he worked within the system and did not step on the toes of the powerful.
Throwing Progressive Leaders Under the Bus
Do West’s claims of prophethood go overboard? Yes. Does Dyson exaggerate these claims? Also yes. Is Cornel West immune from criticism? Absolutely not. He is not perfect. And I concur with Dyson; he is not a prophet.Yet, by siding with a criminal presidential administration over one of the leading purveyors of justice in the world today, figures like Michael Eric Dyson demonstrate, once again, how politically and morally bankrupt liberalism is.
The MSNBC analyst’s essay “The Ghost of Cornel West” exemplifies what is precisely the problem with liberals. They will side (and gleefully, at that) with neoliberal leaders who consider the lives of people in the Global South less valuable than those of Westerners, who wage genocidal wars, and who destroy economies with structural adjustment programs and odious debt, over radical justice-seekers because, in their myopic, ahistorical, and frankly ignorant view, it is “arguably more beneficial” to do so.
Liberals should be much more concerned about the innumerable ghosts of the victims of their leader’s policies than they are about the ghost of one of his most strident critics.
Cornel West is a hero—absolutely, unequivocally a hero. And he is one of the few heroes the Left has today. Unfortunately, that has never stopped liberals from throwing them under the bus.
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