Brother West

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

January 6, 2022

Dr. Cornel West gave the Collins Distinguished Speaker Lecture at the University of Oregon, on April 26, 2019. His lecture was titled “Race Matters…A Timely Discussion on the Fabric of America.” On YouTube, the talk is titled “What It Means to Be Human.” This is a transcription of the first part of the talk:

What It Means to Be Human

Four hundred years of being hated—individually, systemically, chronically, institutionally, and yet the best of the Black tradition is what? Teaching the world so much about love. I could just turn on John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” right now, and sit down. Just let you take it in. Or I could read passages from Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A love so thick that it takes the form of the killing of your precious baby, because you don’t want your baby dirtied and thingified by white supremacist persons, practices, institutions, structures. I could read the love-soaked essays of James Baldwin, the son of Harlem. Never went to college, but at least two colleges went through him. He would say over and over again: “Love forces us to take off the mask we know we cannot live within, but fear we cannot live without.” Courage. Interrogation. There’s never been a figure on the American stage—given all of the genius and talent, of Eugene O’Neill and probably the greatest indictment ever written of the American Empire in The Iceman Cometh, or Tennessee Williams, or Arthur Miller, or August Wilson, or Adrienne Kennedy—but I’m talkin’ about Loraine Hansbury’s A Raisin in the Sun. Has there ever been a figure with more love than Mama on the American stage? Five generations enacted, and her attempt to bequeath and to transmit what the Isley Brothers would call “a caravan of love” to that younger generation. Walter keeps Travis, in light of Old Man Walter—you oughta know the play—who dies, who bequeaths ten thousand dollars, to see whether they’ll get to that vanilla suburb or not. But that’s not the end and aim of it. The aim is: measuring people based on their courageous attempt to cultivate the capacity to think for themselves. To learn how to love. And to laugh. And to hope. I could turn on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?” Every note and the silence between the notes. “Save the babies.” “Who really cares?” Or Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s in Need of Love.” But this love that we’re talking about again—this is not abstract. It is concrete, and it is as real as a heart attack. And it has something to do with the Socratic legacy of Athens. It has something to do with line 38A of Plato’s Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” And we know the Greek actually said: “The unexamined life is not the life of a human.” And we know our English word “human” comes from the Latin humando, which means what? Burial and burying. We’re beings on the way to death. And you can’t talk about race matters, you can’t talk about what it means to be human, without talking about wrestling with forms of death and what it means to be on intimate relations with forms of death. Early physical deaths, indeed, but also social death. That 244 years of  white supremacist slavery attempt to make them socially dead, in the language of the great Orlando Patterson, in his 1982 classic, Slavery and Social Death. Unsuccessful. Resistance, resilience still kicks in, but the attempt to impose a social death. And then a psychic death. And what is psychic death? Well, for black people in the modern world it has to do with trying to wrestle against the forces of niggerization. Because to niggerize a people is to try to convince them they’re less beautiful, they’re less intelligent, they’re less moral—to instill in them unbelievable fear, to instill in them this sense  that they oughta be scared all the time, and intimidated all the time. Laughin’ when it ain’t funny. Scratchin’ when it don’t itch. Wearing the mask, as Paul Lawrence Dunbar said it in his great poem. That’s why one of the most powerful sentences in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, is that line in the letter to the nephew: “Don’t, comma, be afraid.” That’s why Marcus Garvey would always have a black person in front of every major demonstration with a big sign: “The negro is not afraid.” Even if they’re shaking, carrying the sign. That’s why the great Mary Ellen Pleasant, who was the first black woman millionaire in America, known as “the Mother of Human Rights in California.” She happened to be a black domestic maid who married a white Robber Baron, and he dropped dead. She got all his money. And she didn’t kill him. It was a natural thing. But never forget Mary Ellen Pleasant. She gave eight hundred thousand dollars to a white brother named John Brown. That’s how he survived financially on his way to Harper’s Ferry. She would start every lecture, all over California, with the line: “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.” Just like Martin Luther King, Jr. would always say to his staff: “I’d rather be dead than afraid.” Wrestling with what it means to be human. Being on intimate terms with death. And the echoes, going back to Plato, when he says: “Philosophy itself is a meditation on and preparation for death.” Philo sophia, “love of wisdom.” Meditation on, preparation for: death. And even Seneca—and we don’t expect too much profundity from the Romans, they’re so busy running an empire, very much like we Americans—he used to say: “He or she who learns how to die, unlearns slavery.” I’ve told my students for 41 years of my very blessed life of teaching: “When you come in my classroom, you’re here to learn how to die.” “Oh Brother West, I thought I was just taking a Philosophy class, to read some texts, and get a grade.” “No, no! This is paideia. This is p-a-i-d-e-i-a. This is deep education. This is not cheap schooling.” When you’re talking about race matters you’re not just talking about skill acquisition and information. You’re talking about self-interrogation and social transformation. And the best of the University of Oregon, with all of the challenges that go along with any institution of higher learning in our late Capitalist civilization that’s undergoing commodification, bureaucratization, corporatization, rationalization, making it more and more difficult for any kind of paideia to take place. But the students come in so pre-professional. Can’t wait to make their move into the professions. “No, you gotta learn how to think first. No, you gotta learn how to laugh first. You gotta learn how to play first. You gotta wrestle with what it means to be human.” “I’ll get to that later on, I just need my skills.” Oh, what makes you think any democracy can survive, based on dominant forces of corporatization, commodification, bureaucratization and rationalization, in the Weberian sense? You’re gonna end up, as Du Bois said so powerfully in The Souls of Black Folk: “Caught in the dusty desert of smartness and dollars.” And in many ways that’s where we are. I don’t know about the University of Oregon, but back at Harvard oftentimes the highest thing a student can say about themselves is they’re the smartest in the room. And I tell ‘em: “Let the phones be smart, and you be wise.” The fantasizing of smartness, tied to richness—how spiritually empty! How morally vacuous! And, most importantly, reinforcing the worst protocols of professional culture, which are conformity, complacency, and when it’s time to actually act, cowardliness. Because the careerism and the opportunism are so overwhelming . Thank God for Socrates. Thank God for all of those who are willing to, first, begin with themselves. Self-examination. Self-interrogation. And when you give up an assumption or presupposition, when you give up a dogma or a doctrine—that’s a form of death. And there is no education without that kind of death. There’s no maturation without that kind of death. That’s what learning how to die is all about. One of the greatest eulogies ever written—one sentence—by a sister named Dorothy Day, one of the great prophetic figures of the Twentieth Century. She’s my fellow Catholic sister. When Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered, April 4th, 1968, in her historic newspaper The Catholic Worker she said: “Martin Luther King, Jr. learned how to die daily.” To continually grow, continually mature, and it’s endless, it is perennial, and you always end up in a moment of inadequacy—almost an echo of our great lapsed Protestant artistic genius, Samuel Beckett, when he said: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” That’s the best that we can do. But you’re continually in process, calling yourself into question, interrogating whatever assumptions you are falling back on. That’s Socratic energy at its highest level. To come to terms with race matters is to begin with self always already tied to society, always already tied to forms of death, forms of dogma, and forms of domination. To be human is to wrestle with those inescapable and unavoidable realities, to drop any linguistically conscious primate, like ourselves, in time and space, means you’re gonna have to wrestle with forms of death—first, bodily extinction, the psychic and spiritual death, possibly civic death, forms of patriarchy, class-based, could be empire, colonized people. But then: dogma—ideological dogma, religious dogma, political dogma, scientific dogma. You say: “Brother West, how could there be scientific dogma? To be scientific is to be always concerned about questioning.” “Read the history of science.” Just read it closely. The great John Dewey always made a distinction between scientific method and scientific temper. The method itself can become a dogma. Just like skepticism. If you’re not skeptical about skepticism you get locked into a certain kind of skepticism. And in the end it becomes a matter of adolescent activity, because skepticism usually presupposes the vantage point of a spectator. Whereas, criticism is one of a participant. So, you can play all kinds of games as a spectator, but when you are involved, when it comes to your house, and your loved ones, all of a sudden things shift. And that’s one of the great stories of white supremacy in the United States. So often people can be in a state of denial. Look at the U.S. Constitution: any reference to the institution of white supremacist slavery? No! Twenty-two percent of the inhabitants of the thirteen colonies are enslaved. No reference to the institution in your constitution. You’re gonna end up havin’ a Civil War of 750,000 precious people killed over an institution not invoked in your constitution. “Well, Professor West, that’s just a fascinating tension between principal and practice.” “Get off the crack pipe!” That’s called denial. That’s called avoidance. That’s called thinking in fact that you can somehow, through willful ignorance, treat people, conceive of yourself, in ways that those effects and consequences won’t come back to haunt you. What did Malcolm X call it? “Chickens comin’ home to roost.” Sooner or later, you’re gonna reap what you sow. Sooner or later, what you think you’ve been able to escape from is gonna hunt you down. We’re seeing that right now in imperial America. We end up killing almost a million Muslims and can’t say a mumblin’ word in our public discourse. Invasions of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. And then you get the counter-terrorists and we wonder why they’re upset. Now, terrorism, for me, needs to be called into question across the board. Taking the life of innocent human beings, for any reason, is a crime against humanity. But no serious concern about how many Iraqis died. Same is true with our drones. Innocent folk in Yemen and Somalia and Pakistan, Libya, Afghanistan can die. Kill one American—Brother Barack did what? Had a press conference that same day. Gave economic compensation for the family that same day. And yet already denied that they killed any innocent people, as a whole. Quit lyin’! Quit lyin’! Keep track of human beings! Those babies in Yemen and Somalia, those babies in Pakistan—they have exactly the same status and significance as black babies in South Central Los Angeles, as brown babies in East Los Angeles, as white babies in Newtown Connecticut, as yellow babies in San Francisco. And we like to talk about it in the abstract, but when it comes time to being actually tested in our actions, we’re livin’ in denial. We might as well be in Disneyworld on Main Street. And what’s fascinating about Disneyworld—so stereotypically and quintessentially American? There’s a lot of fun there. But there’s no life. And there’s no life because there’s no death. If somebody’s about to die in Disneyworld, you just take ‘em and push ‘em across the line. “You’re gonna besmirch our image. Nobody’s supposed to die in Disneyworld, now.” Ah! I’m bein’ facetious. Y’all get the point, though. Escapist! Escapist! Escapist! Given all of the overwhelming sense of possibility, and supposedly prosperity, and yet, one out of two of our children, black and brown, under six years old, live in poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world. That’s a moral disgrace! Where’s the discourse about it? Martin Luther King, Jr. turns over in his grave. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel turns over in his grave. Are we gonna actually keep track of the underside? Are we gonna be Socratic enough that we can keep track of the Conrad-like heart of darkness shot through all of the life of liberty that we talk about in the United States? Or, sooner or later, you’re gonna reap what you sow. Absolutely. And of course, usually the people who raise this issue end up being misunderstood, misconstrued, marginalized, incarcerated, or shot down like a dog. The truth is too much! It’s too overwhelming! Rather close one’s eyes. And yet, when the crisis comes, ooh, lo and behold! That’s why race matters in regard to indigenous peoples, in regard to our precious brown brothers and sisters. Moving borders. I grew up in California. Used to be Mexico. Read what Ulysses S. Grant says about the Mexican War. Just massive gentrification, a power grab, and a land grab, across the board. Immigration discourse. Well, they comin’ home. They comin’ home. That used to be theirs. Viciously, immorally taken. Or Asian brothers and sisters. The very year in which we had the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your poor”—there’s the Chinese Exclusion Act. So much for our universality. And of course you all here in Oregon, you know about the Black Exclusion Acts of 1844. Is that right? You know about those? [Someone in the audience says: “No, we don’t.”] Well, they need to know. I’m gonna put up a picture. Serious exclusion acts. Black folk can’t step foot in Oregon. “But we’re anti-slavery.” “Yes, but you’re anti-black people, at the same time.” That is highly possible. We human beings, we’re so creative when it comes to mistreatin’ each other. Be against slavery, but don’t want black folks too close. Can’t stand the institution, but oh, when those live human beings and bodies get close, we’re overwhelmed. That’s part of the challenge, too. That’s why any discussion about race is never simply a discussion about policy, structural institutions—as crucial as structural institutions are. But it’s also about the ways in which subjectivities are constructed, the ways in which individuals are created. And then, the choices that people make, not just as persons, but in collectivities, in groups, in communities. And that’s one of the reasons why the best of the University of Oregon or any other institution of higher learning has to put such a stress on that Socratic legacy of Athens, that paideia. And that line 24A of Plato’s Apology, when Socrates says: “Parrhesia is the cause of my unpopularity.” What is parrhesia—p-a-r-r-h-e-s-i-a? Frank speech. Fearless speech. Plain speech. Unintimidated speech. Education at its highest level is about fusing the formation of our wise attention with the cultivation of our critical thinking, that’s linked to the maturation of compassionate and courageous people. Now, we raised the question: “Is courage a dominant virtue in our universities?” Hell, no! No, it’s not at all. It’s about smartness. It’s about status. And, too often, arrogance and condescension. Courage is tied to fortitude. Fortitude is tied to a certain humility. Socrates!: “I know that I know more than others precisely because I know that I know nothing. And they think they know something they do not know.” Intellectual humility. Personal humility. But it’s tied also to a tenacity. “I’m going to raise whatever is inside of me to think for myself,” as Kant put it in What is Enlightenment?  of 1784. The release from self-incurred tutelage. The release from self-imposed immaturity. Dare to think for yourself! That’s what it is to find a voice of my own black tradition. So when Monk tells Coltrane, “You been imitatin’ Johnny Hodges of the Duke Ellington Band too much, John. It’s time for you to find your voice. What does Trane sound like?” And I don’t know how many of you all had a chance to see “Amazing Grace.” Has that hit Eugene yet? Aretha, twenty-nine years old, walks into James Cleveland’s church and raises her voice. And who’s on the front row? Not just her father, Reverend C. L. Franklin, one of the finest of all preachers enacting such a grand oratorical art, but Clara Ward—echoes of Marion Williams—those Aretha imitated, until she found her voice. I don’t know if many of you all got a chance to see “Homecoming” yet, about Beyonce. Oh, we got some Queen Bee beehives up in here? Oh, sooki sooki, now. Yeah. So what does she do when she enters predominantly white space? She brings her whole crew with her, doesn’t she? She brings her whole culture with her—two hundred musicians linked to historically black college performances. And the performances are not mere entertainment. Each one of them are lifting their voices, just like Duke Ellington’s orchestra. Just like James Brown’s band. Just like the musicians in Sly Stone’s group. Each one finding their voice. And they bounce off against each other. Ralph Ellison called it “antagonistic cooperation.” ‘Cause it’s not competition in the market-driven sense: “I’m so good, and you’re sounding so bad.” No. Grow up. We’re in this together. And, most importantly, kenosis. And this is what oftentimes is missing in any serious talk about race matters, especially in the academy, but even outside. And what is kenosis—k-e-n-o-s-i-s? Kenosis is self-emptying, self-donating, self-giving. It’s like the end of a James Brown concert, when he comes out and says, “I’m an extension of you. You’re an extension of me. I’ve just given you three-and-a-half hours of all that I am. Did anybody come here to hear a song we did not play?” “You didn’t play ‘Soul Power,’ James.” He says, “Hit it, Bootsie!” Because you come to serve. You’re not a spectacle. I go to some of these concerts with these young brothers and sisters, highly talented, and all that spectacle hits. I went to one of Usher’s concerts. That negro was flippin’ over like he was in a circus. I said: “ Pick up the microphone and sing a song, negro! I didn’t come here for all this mess!” Spectacle! That’s late Capitalist culture. Image! Spectacle! Superficiality! Titillation! Stimulation! All Aretha Franklin needs is a microphone. She sits down—is that right, my sister?—she sits down at that piano and what does she do? Within three minutes she has touched you in parts of your soul you forgot about. Because she has mastered her craft and her technique in such a way, but she’s there to give, she’s there to enable, she’s there to empower. She wants people to leave feeling as if they could take on death and its forms, domination and its forms, dogma and its forms, and be ready to die with dignity, physically, and then hope your afterlife will be at work in the lives of those who come after. Oh, what a great conception of what it is to be human! Black folk have no monopoly on this. This is a human thing, across the board….

Sorry to stop here. This is about halfway through his talk. It takes quite a while to transcribe it from the video, I’m a day late in getting out this issue, and this is about our normal length. Those of you with access to the Internet are encouraged to watch the whole lecture on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aekb3ppKm5w&t=1813s). (JS)

Dr. West has taught at Yale, Princeton and Harvard. He currently teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York.