Brother Cornel West

Walking on the campus of Princeton University on a recent winter afternoon, looking for her interviewee — a prominent soul who has shaken and marked the American intellectual arena for the past several decades, an electrifying spirit who carries with elegance and humility many titles: philosopher, author, civil rights activist, educator, critic, artist — the interviewer stops to ask the way, as the printed map fails to guide. “That building,” says a young African-American student, pointing to the left. “You are going to see Professor West! I dig the guy!”

Born in 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in Sacramento, California, Cornel West enrolled at Harvard University at the age of 17, completing his studies magna cum laude in three years, and going on to earn a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980. A public figure and a provocative thinker, he burst onto the national scene in 1993 with his book, Race Matters, a searing analysis of racism in American democracy, which sold more than half a million copies. He taught at Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and University of Paris, and wrote 19 books, edited 14, and recorded three music albums. His memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Smiley Books), hit bookshelves recently, in which he tells his own story — discussing anything and everything, from John Coltrane to Malcolm X, Schopenhauer to John Keats, family to politics, rage to love.

His office door opens, and in walks a warm, smiling man in a dark, threepiece suit and a wild afro. The walls of his office are no longer visible, hidden by rivers of books on Mozart, Beethoven, Kafka, Dante, Socrates, Cervantes, Sontag, Sartre; newspaper clippings announcing the passing of jazz greats, Freddie Hubbard and Alice Coltrane; photos with Andre 3000 and Jill Scott; biographies, autobiographies, essays, and such other writings as A Stranger Freedom, No Disrespect, The Mercy of Mandela, and Spiritual Audacity.

Who is Dr. Cornel West? Who is this man who calls himself “a bluesman in the life of the mind, and a jazzman in the world of ideas”? Read on.

Venice: How did you have the clarity at such a young age to seek your life’s purpose?

Cornel West: I think it was a matter of dealing with my rage and trying to transfigure my rage into a holy anger, righteous indignation against injustice, and in doing that I fell in love with life of the mind, so I connected the life of the mind to the struggle for justice, connected the world of ideas to the struggle for freedom.

What was the source of that rage? You talk about it in your memoir, “like morning thunder, rage came early and rained over the first part of my life.”

I cannot fully explain. My parents were so loving, my church was so loving, my neighborhood was so loving. I just had a rebellious spirit, a kind of Promethean sensibility I had very early towards transgression. It was Robin Hood like, in terms of I couldn’t stand to see the weak used and abused — there is no doubt about that. I just couldn’t stand the sight of that. It was true then and it is true now. Where that came from? I don’t know.

How did you turn the fire of rage, which can be destructive, into a positive driving force?

I think it is really about the power of love and the power of education. It’s the fusion of those two. I was influenced by the Black Panther Party; they had a deep love for poor people, which I shared, and of course in the end it was Brother Martin [Luther King Jr.] more than anybody else. Just like Plato lived to preserve the memory of Socrates in the Dialogues, dedicated to one thing: reminding the world that there once lived a man named Socrates. There is a sense of which my own project is always to convince the world to never forget that there once lived a man named Martin Luther King Jr. He and I meet at the cross, because we are both Christians, so there is somebody even greater than him, but in terms of historical 20th-century narrative, it’s about keeping his legacy alive.

Music is a significant component of your life. In what way?

Music really sits at the center of all of it, because music is a humbling art; you recognize the failure of words and you also recognize the inability to remain silent. You get music when the words fail, but you cannot keep it inside; you have to moan, groan, cry, make some kind of noise, try to figure the noise into a sound, give some silence between the notes and sound. Next thing you know, you get melodies and harmonies. That has always been a fundamental model for me in terms of my writing, in terms of my speaking, and most importantly, in terms of my living. The only time Plato talks about music is in his great dialogue, Laches, which is on courage. He says the musical life is, for him, the highest form of the courageous life. What he really is talking about is the art of living. Not only the art of making music, the art of making noise, it’s the art of living. That’s the key.

Plato has a special place in your heart. How so?

I learned a whole lot from Plato. A musical life for me has to do with dealing with how you generate trust in yourself, trust in each other, trust enough even in the trustworthiness of the cosmos, to get up each morning feeling as if it’s worthwhile doing that rather than committing suicide. And there is love, which is commitment to the well-being of others, especially people who are more vulnerable than you are. And since justice is what love looks like in public — justice is love with legs spilling over into the public square — the two become tied together, because when you love, you cannot stand the fact that you are treated unfairly; you loathe being treated unjustly, so justice, in that sense, is a fire inside of you. Just like the fire inside of a Louis Armstrong, who had to go get it out and play his horn, or Mary Lou Williams on the piano, or Sarah Vaughan with her voice. It’s something you cannot keep inside of you, and if you did, the rocks will cry out. Something has got to be expressed.

When I say “jazz,” what comes to your mind?

Jazz is about life, about love, funk, fun, light, dark. Jazz is, for me, the flexible and fluid response to catastrophic circumstances, with a level of style and gusto and zest that can never be repressed, and it’s usually irresistible. When [someone] is touched by it, it becomes contagious; it’s like a wild fire. Oh yes, that’s jazz.

What is the role of education in society? What impact can education have on the minds and hearts of people?

What the Greeks call paideia, which is deep education, allows you to shift your attention from the superficial to the substantial, from the frivolous to the serious, so you move from the surface of pleasures and status and wealth and power to quality of service, decency, dignity, all those things that have worth without price, that are priceless. Deep education always takes you there. Shakespeare takes you there, Dante takes you there, Coltrane takes you there, Nazim Hikmet takes you there. Great thinkers take you toward the depths; they become deep-sea divers wrestling with life, with history, with society. That’s what education was able to do for me. So that rage I had, took the form of righteous indignation against the unnecessary suffering in the world, the unwanted misery in the world, but it also connected with what it means to be human. And that’s the fundamental question.

To be human is hoping to be understood — by a peer, a lover, a stranger. Yet life is imperfect, and therefore misunderstandings become a part of our humanness. Do you ever feel misjudged?

Oh sure, very much so. It’s inevitable. Nobody can get inside of you; nobody can keep track of all your dimensions, facets, and aspects. To be human is to have fears, anxieties, and insecurities. I’ve a calling rather than just a career, I’ve a vocation rather than just a profession. I’ve got a day job, but it’s always subordinate to my life task, which is to tell the truth, and the condition of truth is to let suffering speak.

If knowledge is power, why is there a lack of curiosity in today’s world? The United States, for instance, has a history of wanting to be powerful, yet while doing so wishing to remain ignorant about the outcomes of its actions.

America was born innocent, which itself is a crime, because innocence is tied to violence; if you think you are innocent about indigenous people, babies bleeding, given the vicious attacks on indigenous communities, and still think you are innocent, it hides and conceals the violence, and that’s criminal. America was born innocent as if there were no slavery. Twenty-two percent of the Thirteen Colonies were enslaved, no reference to them in the Constitution. So you begin with deliberate blindness, willful ignorance, which is a pillar of innocence, which is the mode of evasion and avoidance of suffering of other human beings, and therefore you do have that lack of curiosity, which is what you are talking about. What it is, actually, is a repression.

We are better off compared to 50 years ago, yet there is still a long way to go, and much more to do.

We are much better off, yes, because of Martin Luther King and the others. Their movements created new possibilities, unprecedented opportunities in American democracy, from the Immigration Bill in 1965, to the black entrance into the mainstream, and the black upper class. The sad thing is that the black poor and the black working class have been devastated at the very time in which these new possibilities have been made available. So you still have the class and gender issues fundamental in terms of the constraints on real progress for poor people. But the progress for middle- and upper-class folks cannot be denied. Here I am sitting at Princeton; 50 years ago, black people couldn’t set foot on the green grass here.

And here is Barack Obama in the White House!

Black folks could hardly even work in the White House 50 years ago. But like Malcolm X used to say, “You can't drive a knife into a man's back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and call it progress.” You still have work to do. The danger today is to be obsessed with the glass ceiling being broken at the top — Obama at the White House, black CEOs, black professors in Ivy League — and forget about the ones locked in the basement; there are a lot of them. Pre-industrial complex, locked in the hood, uninhabitable housing, disgraceful school systems, unavailable healthcare, unemployment and under-employment in the poor communities right now. That’s catastrophic.

When you look at the United States today, what do you see?

I see an empire in decline, a democratic system that is more and more broken, a congress that is beholden to corporate power.

And the Middle East?

There is so much neglect, there is so much bias, and there is so much confusion. A lot of cowardice, of neglect, that has to do with the people who are being subjugated.

You came out with a music album with Prince, Talib Kweli, and others appearing as guest artists. Can this be regarded as a tool to embrace hip hop as a way to educate?

As an educator, I want a singing education as much as a textual education. Unsettle the mind, touch the soul, inspire the heart, bear witness to truth and justice. If ballet were the dominant form of communicating today, I would take off my suit, put on my ballerina clothes, and enact ballet as a form of communicating, because I’ve a passion to communicate, whatever the venue is. I’ve a deep love for young people, which means I have to be humble enough to recognize that I don’t understand their world, so I have to try to get inside their world as much as I can, and hip hop is the universal language of young people all over the world.

You wrote your prominent work, Race Matters, in the aftermath of Rodney King in 1992 and the L.A. riots. What was it that you were trying to convey with this book?

First and foremost, it’s just the fundamental affirmation of the full-fledged humanity of black people and people of color. And when you say “race matters,” you are essentially saying people of color and black people count, that their suffering and needs are to be taken under consideration. If white kids had the level of incarceration that black kids do, it would be a national emergency. When they have a shootout at Columbine, they have a major discussion all around the country for weeks. They’ve got shootouts in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, L.A., every day, that they don’t even take notice of. Race matters. It has to be said.

What gives you the strength to keep on going?

Love. Love from family, love from friends, and having your own convictions, your own commitments, your sense of wanting to leave an imprint on the world, so that you can make it, as you hope to, just a little better before you leave. I had people put a gun to my wife’s head, looking for me, wearing a mask in our kitchen; I had people in the driveway looking for me with a shotgun; I got to run out of my house in Boston; I had to live in a hotel for years with 24/7 security; I was pronounced dead in a newspaper when I was coming to give a lecture at the University of Utah, because it was said they had killed me before I had even gotten to the city. That goes hand in hand with telling the truth. I’m lucky to have lived for as long as I have. I’ve had a good time. [laughs]

In 300 years, how would you like to be remembered?

As the son of Irene and Clifton. That’s my greatest honor. Being a professor at Princeton, Yale, Harvard — those are wonderful things, but they fall short from being the son to Irene and Clifton West.

How did your upbringing shape your character?

My parents were supportive, caring, corrective; they made you feel like you were somebody without ever having to put others down. For me, that has always been the benchmark of greatness. I’ve never been that impressed with braininess; we live in a culture that almost worships smartness, and I find that to be a joke, because some of the Nazis were very smart. Some of the Afrikaners in South Africa had Ph.D.s and were brilliant, but they were sitting right on a system that was barbaric, because they were brainy but they didn’t have compassion. I remember when my dad dropped me at Harvard. He told me, upfront, “I know you are going to do well, but I’m less concerned about the grades you are going to receive and more concerned about the person you become.” That’s wisdom. That’s spiritual maturity. It’s much better to be a B-minus student with a heart of gold than to be summa cum laude and a gangster.

How does a heart of gold survive in the market-driven world we live in, that’s ambitious about moneymaking.

It’s easy to overlook that in this society that is concerned about money, and smartness, and glitter, and glamour, and how you look, and how you are perceived, and so on. All of them are spiritual malnutrition, emptiness of soul. Spiritual malnutrition usually goes hand in hand with moral constipation; when you know what’s good, you know what’s right. But it’s stuck, and you cannot get it out, and we live in such a society. At the end, we all hunger for the same things: We want protection, we want recognition, and we want association, and people who love us. That’s all. That’s a whole lot, but if you can get that, you are in very good shape. Most people are not protected. Illness and domination and so forth, they are unrecognized, not respected. Their humanities are not affirmed, and they oftentimes don’t get a chance to connect and bond with people who give them a sense of elevation, a sense of wanting to be the best that they can be.

What made you want to write your latest book, which is a memoir?

It was when I was diagnosed with cancer. Tavis Smiley came up with the idea that it was time for me to write a memoir. I thought about it, but I thought it’s too much of a narcissistic endeavor; it’s naval gazing and talking about yourself. But when the cancer hit me and the doctors didn’t give me much time to live, I had a chance to think, and I said, “You know what? Maybe I can write my story so it can help somebody, and people can get a sense of the tradition that produced me. So that that tradition will remain visible, and that tradition will remain palpable and accessible to people.”

What do you hope people take from it?

Inspiration. I think the highest form of giving to another person is to inspire.

Where do you find your inspiration?

In Brahms, Coltrane, Faulkner... There is a certain kind of communion with greatness that inspires, because for them to achieve that level, they had to be profoundly inspired. Everybody is who they are, not somebody else. Everybody has their own cross to bear, their own crisis, death of their child, father, a war situation. You know, black people are blues people; the blues are chronicles of catastrophies expressed lyrically. When B.B. King says, “Nobody loves me but my mama, and she could be jivin’ too,” that’s the blues. You’ve got to love yourself, and you’ve got to sing about it to give yourself the energy to deal with it. ▼

Brother West: Living And Loving Out Loud is out. For more information visit www.cornelwest.com