Dr. Cornel West asks the audience, “How solid are your roots?” Photo: Renato Rotolo/Urban News
by Moe White

Cornel West is among America’s most prominent public intellectuals. Professor Emeritus at Harvard and Yale, he now teaches Philosophy and Christian Practice at New York’s renowned Union Theological Seminary.

He is also a natural performer with the presence of a stage actor, the intensity of a politician, and the intellectual breadth and depth of a true genius. When he speaks, whether privately to a fan or publicly to a crowd of three thousand like the one that sat raptly listening at UNC Asheville’s Sherrill Arena Nov. 6, he focuses like a laser on the subject at hand, even as his mind makes connections between Plato and Foucault, DuBois and Douglass, Nina Simone, Barack Obama, and local historian Darrin Waters.

West had been scheduled to speak at UNCA in October, but he postponed his visit when his elder brother Clifton faced a serious health crisis. (Clifton West was, in 1972, the first black American miler, as opposed to dasher, to run in the Olympics.) There was, he said, no question as to what mattered more to him: his commitment to speak in Asheville, or his brother. Family represents “from whence I come,” he said. “I am who I am because somebody loved me. Somebody told me, showed me that I could make a difference in space and time. And that’s where I had to be—at his side.”

That sense of rootedness became one of the themes Dr. West addressed throughout his 75-minute talk. He implored the audience to discover “how solid are your roots? You must have deep roots so you can take your route through life…to make a difference.” For, he explained, living is the human’s way of understanding and avoiding death, both the personal death of Plato’s “unexamined life,” and the cultural death of a life passed without engagement in the community.

Dr. West has well earned his reputation as both a thinker and writer and as a thorn in the side of the establishment. Unlike many intellectuals who earn a safe place in academia and blunt their edge as the years go by, West has continued examining his own life, his own dogmas, and the platitudes that dominate most of our public dialogue. Whether by challenging President Obama to live up to his campaign promises or calling out the monetizers and privatizers who have put price tags on every aspect of our culture, he has made waves and made enemies for the past 20 years.

Fifty years ago, he noted, 42% of the American economy was from manufacturing; today 42% is in banking and investment. Then, our corporations “produced cars and steel and scores of other products; today Wall Street produces ‘deals.’” As a culture, he said, “We are so obsessed with success that we are willing to be imitators rather than originals.” We buy and sell others’ products and ideas, create second- and third-generation financial products resting not on actual goods and services but on loans and borrowed money.

And that, he points out, is at the heart of the emptiness in American society. We used to make things; now we buy and sell them, and borrow against them to turn their intrinsic value into private profits. What was once a tradition in black America, a tradition of valuing education and hard work and opportunities for success, has been replaced by a market culture that values quick returns from drug dealing and rap music above invention and dedication and training. “In the classroom, on the block, in churches, and in prison cells, there’s a market culture everywhere” that, he says, leads to social and societal death.

Dr. Cornel West discussed race, gender, and class in American society.  Photo: Renato Rotolo/Urban News
Dr. Cornel West discussed race, gender, and class in American society. Photo: Renato Rotolo/Urban News

That cultural death has been with us since it began in 1492 with slavery, the social death of families, individuals, dignity, reverence, trust, and honor—not just for slaves but their owners as well. The era of Jim Crow encompassed civic death through constant, unremitting domestic terrorism for a large proportion of American society, for millions of American citizens. “For fifty-five years,” he noted, “every two-and-a-half days someone was lynched in America.” One hundred-fifty people a year for half a century is twice the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq; and the lynchings went on with scarcely a murmur for most of those decades.

Today the new Jim Crow entails not just suppressing the vote across the South through new “Voter ID” laws and other means, but also killing the love of learning for its own sake, the enrichment of the arts and music; it entails even the privatizing and profitizing of schools. It has produced two full generations of poor black and brown children consigned to the prison-industrial complex that is a $2-billion-dollar per year industry—an industry that is highly profitable to its owners, managers, investors, and the politicians who support and perpetuate it, but which is virtually invisible to middle-class society, even as it leads to deeper, more widespread civic death.

“We are in this together,” said Dr. West. “For generations it was the philosophy of the black community that ‘we lift as we climb’: as we go up the ladder with our feet, we reach back a hand to help pull up those beneath us.” That social construct and social compact is the mark of a living, healthy society. Today, it is tattered; those who climb up stomp on the fingers of those trying to climb up behind them.

The answer to constantly rising social inequality, the fetishizing of money, and the monetizing of the entire culture, is not class warfare or hatred of the rich, Dr. West warned. It is rather an ethic of love.

“We must make a steadfast commitment to the well-being of others. In a market-driven culture, there’s nothing wrong with an ethic of love, which is love of learning, love of community. We must refuse to return hatred with hatred. We must follow the guidance of Mamie Till after the horrendous murder of her 15-year-old son Emmett: “I don’t have a minute to spare for hate. I shall pursue justice the rest of my life.”

Cornel West posed four questions to the audience, questions that shape examination of the self: How does a person of integrity face oppression? How does an honest person face deception? What does a person of decency do in the face of insult? How does a person of virtue meet brute force?

All humans, he said, decide and determine who we are in determining how we address those questions. And by examining our lives, learning about the cultural death that surrounds and destroys us, we can learn how to live.

-Cornel West is the author of Race Matters (1994), Democracy Matters (2005), The Rich and the Rest of Us (2012), and numerous other books.