← Conversations with Coleman
Loading summary
Transcript50 lines
- [00:01]
A
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Dr. Cornel West. Dr. West is a philosopher, political activist and public intellectual. A longtime professor at institutions including Harvard and Princeton, he has been one of the most prominent left wing voices in American public life for more than four decades. He was also an independent candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. This week is All About America at 250. We talk about how American history should be taught at the K through 12 level. We talk about the moral status of American capitalism. We talk about whether the secularization of the Western world is a net good. We talk about what it's like to run for president. And Finally, I asked Dr. West for his opinion on the Drake Kendrick beef. So without further ado, Dr. Cornell West.
- [01:01]
B
Okay.
- [01:02]
A
Dr. Cornell west, thank you so much for coming on my show.
- [01:05]
B
Thank you, my brother. You very kind to have me. Very much so.
- [01:10]
A
It's been a couple years since I seen you. We actually did remember, we did an event a couple years ago in New
- [01:16]
B
York City together, I think, at the Beacons Theater. We had a wonderful dialogue. I've met your wonderful father, brother Dwayne.
- [01:26]
A
That's right. That's right. Good memory.
- [01:27]
B
Yeah, we. Oh, we had a good time. We had a good time though, man. Definitely. Yeah, Indeed.
- [01:35]
A
Ever since then, I've been calling you the black Dalai Lama because you're the definition of good vibes. And you know, though, everyone knows, everyone who's met you knows this, but people out there don't, don't know this, that you famously light up a room just, just by being in it. You're just one of those people.
- [01:52]
B
Wow, you very kind though, brother. You very kind.
- [01:55]
A
But it's a special thing to have.
- [01:57]
B
Oh, indeed, indeed. You're so kind.
- [02:00]
A
So the occasion of this conversation is I was trying to see who would be a good guest to talk to about America's 250th birthday and everything that means, all the questions that that raises about how this American project is doing, the accomplishments that have been made, the struggles we're still facing, the seeming constant state of psychological crisis that we all feel with respect to politics. Maybe not all of us, but many of us. And your name came up and I thought you'd be the perfect guest. And a lot of the themes in your work struggle with the same themes that many people are going to be talking about as we think about America's 250th in particular, the moral state of the country. How are we doing as a people to. To what extent Are we living up to the ideals of the Founding Fathers? To what extent was the promise of America itself corrupted by its very incomplete realization at, you know, for the first hundred years, arguably the first, you know, 180 years, 190 years of the country, have we transcended those flaws? Coming up on this birthday. And I guess I tee all of that up for you to see what. What you're thinking, what you're thinking about the state of the American project at this time.
- [03:41]
B
Well, man, I appreciate the. The number of issues raised, though, brother. For me, the first thing to keep in mind is that the American Experiment must be looked at against the backdrop, not just of modern history, but of human history. And for me, most of human history is the history of organized greed and weaponized hatred and routinized cruelty and institutionalized indifference to the weak and vulnerable. We are a wretched species. We have to just acknowledge that in terms of the history of humanity, history of the human species. And what we're looking for then are what are those moments of interruption that can push back the greed, push back the hatred, push back the cruelty, push back the indifference and create some kind of constructive vision and sense of possibility? Anything you create, given that backdrop is going to be incomplete. Anything you create against that backdrop is going to be imperfect. It's going to be inadequate, it's going to be insufficient. The American Experiment was one of those moments of interruption to say there's a possibility of creating a constitutional republic in which a slice of the voices of ordinary people can be heard to push back the greed and the hatred and power of monarchs, of kings. Now, in that sense, it's a very important moment and not to be downplayed. Now, of course, the forms of organized greed and weaponized hatred would be ongoing because you've got indigenous peoples, vicious attacks and genocidal effects. You got barbaric enslavement of your descendants and my descendants and so forth. But they're human beings. They're not just black people in the abstract. They're precious human beings. You got white brothers who can't vote because they have no property. You have to vastly have women who have no assets. So that we have to be able to look at the American Experiment and at its very beginning, against the backdrop of what? Edward Gibbon, who publishes Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the same year as the founding of the American Experiment. And what does he say? Human history is little more than the register of human crimes and follies. He's right about that. In Many ways. But when you actually stretch out that little more, what is that? Something more? The great William James talked about that something more is those moments of interruption in which on a personal, interpersonal level you have loves and grins and hugs. On a macro social level, you have solidarity of people organizing to bring power and pressure to bear. And what the American experiment did was created a possibility because it built in revision, of course, with the amendments of the Constitution, with the possibilities of expansion of the public, the possibility of the broadening of voices from below to sustain some moment of interruption against the backdrop of the greed and the hatred and the cruelty and the indifference. Now jump forward to 2026. What do we have? Well, one, we have an American experiment that because it viewed itself as so exceptional, somehow not just a beacon of liberty in the city, on the hill, but outside of liberty, those very dominant forces of history, greed, hatred, cruelty, indifference, somehow America would escape all of those. Now, you know, that's just what would be the right word here, sophomore utopian projection. America was created by human beings. Yeah, but it's against the backdrop of what, what, what I just noted, what has happened back and forth, not just under Trump, but this has been happening for 250 years is the oscillation between the intensifying of the organized greed and the weaponized hatred and then the push back, the attempt to gain some kind of alternative so that the greed and the hatred are not always in the driver's seat. And that's a very, very difficult thing. This is where you really do come to lead for me. You see the best of the black freedom tradition, brother. Because, see, the best of the black freedom tradition has been one that say what? We're not living in denial. Black folk have never believed America was the grand beacon of liberty when you're enslaved. Beacon of liberty when Jim Crow? No, not at all. But at the same time, we've had a soul craft, we've had a character formation in the best of our leadership, from Harriet Tubman to Martin King to Frederick Douglass, a Philly Randolph that said what? Said exactly what Emmett Till's mother said when her child was buried, I don't have a minute to hate. I will pursue justice for the rest of my life. So that in the face of all that ugly greed, we don't just promote more greed in the face of the hatred. We just don't promote more hatred in the face of the cruelty and the indifference. We don't say we can out, we can promote cruelty better than those who are promoting cruelty against us. No There's a spiritual and a moral excellence that had to be taken serious. And the black folk don't gang ancestors by means of skin pigmentation. No. You got a whole history of black cowards and gangsters and thugs and criminals. It is soulcraft. It's character formation. That's where Martin King comes from. That's where Harriet Tubman comes from. That's where John Coltrane comes from. I know you. Jazz man's brother playing Joe Tombo. Yeah. J.J. johnson shot all through you out of Indianapolis.
- [10:36]
A
That's right.
- [10:39]
B
Where'd that blues and jazz come from? Raising questions about what it means to be human at the deepest level. It cuts deeper than gender and class and race and color and nation. It is human. Those are moral and spiritual dimensions that are so important. And that's one of the reasons why the best of the black freedom tradition has been the leaven in the American Democrat loaf. There would have been so much more hatred and greed if black people had formed the black version of the Ku Klux Klan. We refuse to do it on moral and spiritual grounds. That's very important. Yeah. And part of our aim is to keep that tradition alive no matter what the circumstances and conditions are. Not just here, but of course, with solidarity of people who were being oppressed and hated and terrorized around the world, no matter who they are, no matter what part of the country, no matter which corner of the globe they are.
- [11:41]
A
Okay. You raise a lot of things there. I want to follow up and I want to go back to the beginning. You made an incredibly important observation, one that I've thought in my own conceptual language many times, which is that everything depends on whether you judge America against the backdrop of the world in which it was born or whether you judge it in a vacuum. And this is true not just of America. This is actually true of every major religion too. Right. Like if you, if you judge what the Old Testament says by. By modern standards, it's, well, slavery is legal in there. Right. It doesn't say get rid of your slaves. It says, here's how you regulate slavery. If you judge the Quran against the backdrop of today, again, slavery is. Is legal, women are second class citizens and all the rest. If you judge it against the world that it actually came into. Many of these texts were relatively progressive. Right?
- [12:49]
B
Right.
- [12:49]
A
Like the fact that the Quran told you to, you know, treat your slaves nicely and consider even manumitting them as. As an optional act of kind of service that was progressive relative to the norm at the time, which was everyone enslave and Everyone, period. Right.
- [13:09]
B
That's right.
- [13:10]
A
So it's, it's, it's crucial to judge things in their context. My, my worry with how people learn American history is what they learn is that America founded itself on liberty and simultaneously kept black people in bondage. Purely hypocritical. Many of them knew it was hypocritical at the time. Some of them were more courageous and principled in fighting it, some were more practical, less principled, and, and so forth. But what they don't learn is the backdrop, right? So if you don't understand that slavery was the norm pretty much everywhere in the world at the time, including on the continent of Africa, in the Middle east, in Korea, in China, serfdom in Russia, if you, if you learn about it in a void, you come away feeling much more like America is a case study in hypocrisy mainly, rather than a case study in the attempt to be better. And my, my question is really for you. Have you thought much about what it is that Americans should learn about their country, let's say K through 12? And to just to add one more element to this, I believe very strongly in what I would call the curation problem, where everyone thinks the problem with history is like the problem that people lie about history, which is true, right? People lie. They say the Holocaust didn't happen. They say the slaves were happy. They say all this nonsense that has been debunked by careful scholars over the years. But the much deeper problem with history is the curation problem. It's the fact that you've only got one one hour a day and a few pages in a textbook and two class field trips a year. And you have to pick what's important, and by definition, you have to exclude most of what happened. And so by picking by your choice of what to teach, you know, assume everything is taught correctly, factually, your mere choice of what to teach, and therefore what not to teach, is imparting a kind of values of its own. And so how do we deal with that? Like, what do we actually teach young Americans about their country?
- [15:36]
B
Yeah, that's a very powerful question, though, brother. And for me, I just begin with the notion that all of us human creatures, we human beings, we are crack vessels. And the best that we ever do is to learn how to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts. And what that means then is that when you approach trying to understand the complexity of history, all of the ambiguous legacies of history, the good and the bad, that exist simultaneously in the same traditions, all of that Is a question of cultivating some kind of genuine humility. But see, if you begin reading American history on the assumption that somehow Americans are so exceptional and special and chosen, and therefore our history is going to be very different than the Russians and the Chinese and the Guatemalans and the Ethiopians and the Mongolians and the Persians, then you're already on a sentimental road rather than on a realistic road. And the great Oscar Wilde used to say, what? Cynicism is the flip side of sentimentalism. So if you start with sentimental notions of all the good on one side and all the bad on the other, and then you discover, lo and behold, the country that you thought was so exceptional, it's just like other countries. You got good and bad, you got hatred and. And difference. You got love and you got cruelty and so forth. So that humility is a shattering of this false sentimentalism that leads towards cynicism and it generates a realism that's predicated on this, though, brother, you know better than anybody else coming out of that wonderful philosophy department at Columbia University, man. Which is the fallible quest for truth and goodness and beauty. And if when you. When you predicate it on the fallible quest for truth. And part of the condition of truth is what to allow suffering to speak your own suffering. Any others. When you're talking about history, part of beauty is the great real cassette. Beauty ain't nothing but the first touch of tear that we can bear. So beauty, very much like the blues and jazz, are very much like Beethoven, comes from wrestling with deep, unflinchingly honest encountering with suffering and grief and loss. And goodness has to do with unflinchingly looking at the evil not just in others, not just in society, but in one's self. And how then do you muster the armor to fight back the worst, to accent the best? So that, for example, you know, I've lectured for kindergarten. Some of my best lectures. Actually, some of my peak lectures have been to kindergarten, bro. And I look at those brothers and sisters and say, oh, I'm looking at your eyes. Your eyes are the windows of your soul. How many of you all take a bullet for your mama and they jump up? I say, I'm in the right place. I'm in the right place now in loving your mama. Is your mama perfect? Is she pure? Is she always right at every instant? Get real quiet. Let's be honest. No, she isn't. But you still love her, don't you? You still. Yes, I do. Brother. Stand up. If you love your mama now, you stand up. Ah, now we get a little Socratic dimension to this thing, because Socrates is about what noble discontent, an appreciation of what you have, but a willingness to be critical of yourself, society and the world. So when we approach American history, we have to say, now let us look at what's going on with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, what's going on with Thomas Paine from England, what's going on with the enslaved folk, what's going on with Phyllis Wheatley, any of the figures, voices of that time. We're going to look for the best, we're going to look for the worst to just like your mama. We're going to look for that which can sustain us personally, socially, politically, civically. And we're going to look for what stands in the way. And what stands in the way is always heavy, brother. This is my blue sensibility, you see.
- [20:08]
A
So how do you deal with, I mean, to the extent that America has been a force for good in the world, you know, a lot of that is because America is a big country. We exist from sea to shining sea. There was, as you know, throughout the 19th century, common assumption among Americans of all political stripes that America ought to conquer the continent. I'm reading a biography of Washington right now, and I didn't know this. He usually referred to America in the early years as an empire, not as a republic. But what he meant by it was not an overseas empire like Britain. He meant this continent. Like, we've got to get a hold on this continent. And the idea of Providence, you know, I don't know. I don't think most of the founding fathers didn't necessarily believe in a God that was answering prayers every day, but they believed in a divine force that was guiding the hand of the American Revolution towards victory and towards conquest of the continent. And this is what every textbook taught until probably until 1900. And, you know, the textbooks would teach that, you know, there was a God sent a wind to help carry Washington's troops over the Delaware. And this kind of thing. All of this by modern ethics, looks just like excuses for colonization. And in some cases, genocide, but certainly colonization. And yet the America that we inherit today with Texas and California, you could add the Mexican War to this, right? Like, we started that war by all historical accounts, I mean, even if technically a Mexican fired the first shot, we effectively provoked it on purpose as, as, as, as a land grab. And viewed in isolation, like, yeah, that's. That seems like a pretty unethical act by most people's ethics today. But the, the end result was, I think, a country, a large country that was a force for good on the planet and has been for all the intervening years. How do you reconcile that? How do you make sense of all that philosophically? Right? Because if you are speaking purely in consequentialist terms, you can think along the lines of, well, all of those terrible actions led to a result of a country that has fought for liberty around the world, served as an example to other countries. Countries beat the Soviet Union, beat Nazi Germany, bequeathed a peace dividend since World War II, most peaceful era basically in human history since 1945, under the American de facto empire. And yet we violated all of these principles that most of us believe in to this day. So as a philosopher, how do you think about the ethics of that?
- [23:30]
B
I think the important thing to keep in mind, though, brother, is the variety of voices and figures and movements in the history of the American empire. The first thing you do, and you already noted this, you've got to reject all forms of monolithic and homogeneous characterizations of the American empire. There's no such thing as American empire being one thing. This takes us back to the philosophical question of the one and the many, right? So that, for example, when we say it's a force for good, and you say, well, look at Mexico when he pushed out the French to defend the Mexicans. United States did that. That was a force for good. Mexican War? No, Thoreau's going to jail and Emerson's got a critique because it's a phony war. And of course, Ulysses S. Grant, who was part of it, would say the same thing in his, in his, in his memoir, right? So that the, the first thing you have to keep in mind is there's a variety of figures and perspectives, sometimes variety of perspectives in the same figure. Lincoln, on the one hand, will give you inaugural address the first time and talk about, I'm open to compromising with black people being enslaved in perpetuity. Frederick Douglass called him what, the slave hound from Illinois? That's Frederick Douglass. Part of Lincoln's greatness was what, he changed his mind. 1872. He meets with the leaders. He wants to send him to Haiti. He wants to send them. We can't live together. We have to have black people leaving. He changed his mind at the end. By 1864, maybe we can create a multiracial democracy. And then you get the second inaugural address, one of the greatest speeches ever given, not just in the United States, but given by a politician, by elected official. And what is it about? It's about humility. It's about Everyday people. It's about two sides praying to the same God predicated on a barbaric evil of enslaving these peoples. And he's speaking in the midst of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of precious human beings who have been killed in the Civil War. He's growing all the time. Now. That's not normal for human beings, let alone politicians. Most people don't grow like that. That level of maturity is not widely distributed, unfortunately. It takes a lot of courage. Courage is never, ever in high supply in any context, any group, any society. You got to cultivate that at the highest level. And it's a very difficult thing to do. But thank God there's always a cloud of witnesses to do that. But in saying all this, what I'm actually saying is that we have to be able to keep track of the American voices that. That have been critical of American crimes. You have to keep track of the non American voices from outside that have been critical of American crimes. And those American voices come in all colors. One of the great contributions of the United States is the stress on the dignity, sanctity, voice and presence of everyday people and the shaping of their destinies mediated by their participation in the institutions that shape those destinies. Now, you can call it democratic, small D, or whatever it is that has inspired people around the world. And that's the best of Emerson. That's the best of Whitman. That's the best of the blues. And Louis Armstrong. That's the best we can go on and on and on. That's the best of Ellison. That's the best of Richard Wright. That's the best of early Saul Bellow. That's the best of. We got so many American writers who accent that in a very, very powerful way. Thomas, Princeton, still alive, he almost 85 years old. Toni Morrison, all of these folk. Now, it's not just by virtue of them being Americans, because you've got Americans who are highly critical of the voices of ordinary people. And those are very important voices too. Right. When John Adams argued the demos can be as tyrannical as kings. I'm not a Democrat. John Adams got a strong point. But it's a challenge for Democrats like ourselves. It's a challenge for him. It was a conclusion, right? Democracy. No, Plato's right about democracy. It's always one of the unruly passion. It's always one of the ubiquitous ignorance of the demos who refuses to be cultivated, refuses to undergo maturation, and will always result in tyranny. That's Plato in the Republic. That's a powerful argument that's a skeleton in our closet as small d Democrats. John Adams had the same thing. Henry Adams, one of the greatest men of letters in the education of Henry Adams. Same argument, anti democratic arguments. I don't believe in the capacity of the demos to undergo education cultivation and maturation to really govern themselves. They will be just as tyrannical as the kings and suzerains and monarchs of the past. You know, you look at Hitler in the 30s, you look at the majority of white Americans supported slavery, majority of white Americans supported Jim Crow. That's the tyranny of the majority that the great de Tocqueville talked about. Democracy can't be just about majorities or you just end up with a tyranny of the majority. Yes, John Adams has a crucial point, but we come back as small d Democrats and say, but we want those voices to be heard, especially as those voices are able to undergo forms of education and cultivation and maturation so they don't become just as autocratic as the autocracies that have crushed them. But it's always an open question, always an open question. So that when I hear my right wing brothers and sisters say, well brother West, Trump was elected over and over, so you got to somehow not just acknowledge that, but as a Democrat, go along with the majority. Never in a million years, no. In the name of Socrates and Jesus and Martin King and Fannie Lou Hamer and Dorothy Day, we're talking about moral and spiritual excellence. This is not about just majority, but we respect the right of the majority to be wrong because we're not autocrats. They said the majority votes in a way we disagree with. That doesn't mean we cut their necks off. That doesn't mean we silence them. We lost. Now keep in mind there is a sense in which my beloved daughter always reminds me, she said, daddy, look like you have been tied to lost causes all your life. You call it for the evolution of poverty, the evolution of white supremacy, some trying to tame hyper predatory capitalism in such a way that it can satisfy needs rather than put short term profits at the center. Dealing with all the various challenges, are those lost causes in a certain sense in any historical moment? So far, yes, they have been. But, but there's been movement, there's been amelioration, there's been betterment, there's been some relative progress, no doubt about that. But it's all, it's a lost cause in terms of it being fully realized. Oh, there's no doubt about that. But I do think that, you know, we reflect on July 4th, 250 years ago, that if we can't do justice to the fallibility of the quest for a constitutional republic, given the backdrop of thousands of years of vicious forms of monarchy and rule by unaccountable elite, then shame on us. But that doesn't mean then that we end up just crowning and exalting uncritically what took place 250 years ago. Because why? We are pursuers of truth, beauty, goodness. Those three are always bigger than any historical moment, bigger than any individual, bigger than any movement.
- [32:44]
A
Yeah. So one of the, I forget the way your daughter put it, but one of the, One of the fights she said that you've been waging, maybe without winning, is against predatory capitalism. I don't know exactly how you put it. This is a subject I think, perhaps I think about differently than you do, but I'm curious to see if there is a difference. From my perspective, clearly one of the reasons why America has been such a successful country, and in particular such a country that the poor, the multiracial, multicultural poor of the world are by and large dying to get into, is because we've had an economy that grows, you know, 2 to 3% every year for a very long time. We've, we inherited strong institutions from Britain, the rule of law enforcement, of contracts, open and competitive markets, and all of that has made us a wealthy country and an innovative country. And the sum total of that has been such an enormous benefit to the people who live here that the poor of the world are, as I said, dying to get in. Still, to this day, I count America's success at capitalism as one of the prime reasons for that. And so when I hear the word capitalism, I have largely positive connotations with it. And when I hear critiques of it that don't acknowledge that, that's really at the core of why this is such a. A desirable place to be a striving poor person. It's like either all the immigrants of the world are like, wrong and stupid to come here, or they know something, I think they know something, which is that this is where you want to be. So what accounts for that if America is, you know, a predatory capitalist hellscape, as so many people, I think, on parts of the left would contend.
- [35:09]
B
Yeah, yeah, no, that's a fascinating question, a very important one. I would never deny, my dear brother the unprecedented levels of opportunity and upward mobility that the American capitalist machine has been able to present to itself and the world. I think that's what you are acknowledging that People want access to the United States from the very beginning because they just see this economic opportunity. If you got a Homestead act of 1862 and you got 160 free acres and you're a peasant and oppressed southern Italy and you got two or three acres of land, you're going to get on a boat and try to make your way. I said, my God, look at these opportunities. This is upward mobility. This is unbelievable. But this is where I have a deep disagreement with you. And you tell me what you think, that it's the conditions under which those opportunities and that upward mobility is possible. And take that 1862 example, right? That on the one hand you got free land for presence around the world. Unprecedented. Man, like, my God, it's like Thomas More's utopia. Elements of it have come into realization, wow, but what are the conditions under which that's true? Oh, my God, you got this slavery for what one slave man is worth more than some of the biggest commodities outside of the South. That's one of the preconditions for that economic opportunity. You see, same is true in terms of the upward mobility, right? The upward mobility is unprecedented, including our precious southern Eastern European peasants coming from Jew hating Russia, Jew hating eastern Russia, the Irish, 800 years of British imperialism, they're dealing with the Wales. We haven't even got to Italy yet. But what is that? Those opportunities are those unprecedented forms of upward mobility available for those enslaved folk? Hardly. Not at all. You know, a sliver, you know, you got some free black folk, you know what I mean, at the top here or there. Same is true on the Jim and Jane Crow, okay, We got more opportunity, especially after 12 years of multiracial democracy. But Union army wins the war, white supremacy, 1877 wins the peace. So you got slavery by another name, just like Cicero called Rome what Republic by another, only in name. So that on the one hand, you've got the conditions under which these opportunities end up with mobility and that is never to be denied. That is very, very real. And that, that's, I think, one of the major sources of why people want to come. But I think there is something else of why people do come to the United States, which is not solely economic. I think there is a cultural dimension to it. There's a level of energy and vitality and vibrancy in American culture. And that has to do with a number of different factors. But people like to get in on it. And of course, the music is at the highest level because, you know, I believe the black musical tradition is the Greatest tradition of the modern world in terms of artistic genius, spiritual fortitude, and moral courage. So you're talking about blues and gospel, but you're also talking about the Hank Williams on the vanilla sides who are blues men, but on the vanilla sides. But they're interacting with these different folk. So it's the music. It's in the language of Huck Finn that Mark Twain's genius captured. It's in the ways in which people have a sense of freedom, the way they have swing and swag. And that's not just a black thing. That is a deeply new world thing and very much a us thing. People are attracted to that. People hear Tupac in Turkey. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Lord. They may hear your album. Oh, we got Coleman out of New Jersey sounding good. My God, what's going on in the United States? These brothers and sisters come up with this linguistic creativity and oral expression. Something is going on. The beat, the font, the polyrhythms, the syncopation. Something is happening in that country now. That doesn't mean there aren't forms of barbarism still operating. You got lynching still happening during 1877, all the way up to the 1950s. You see what I mean? So that I would want to acknowledge that you're on to certain truths in terms of the opportunity. I don't think that it's. My critique of predatory capitalism, I think is more thorough and chronic than yours is because I go back to the conditions for the very possibility of the opportunities and the upward mobility that you're talking about. And you and I would agree, when you go back to those conditions for the possibility, oh, my God, it's ugly. That's part of my critique of Brother Mandami. You know, he sounded like Oscar Hanlon in Harvard in the 1950s. And his classically uprooted when he used to begin his. The great Hanlon, who was my dear brother. But we had deep, deep. America is a nation of immigrants. No, no, that's not true. That's not true. It's a nation of indigenous peoples and enslaved peoples and immigrants. And immigrants have been crucial, indispensable in terms of the creativity and massive contributions. But if you only talk about the immigrants, you going to erase and eliminate preconditions. When I hear Mamdani talking about New York City is a city of immigrants, I say there wouldn't have been a New York City without the slave economy. There wouldn't have been a New York City without an indigenous people's land. And they are as much American as folk who came from 1840s in the 1880s all the way up to, as a result of the black freedom Movement in 1965. So Mandani and his family could come because you know how white supremacist immigration policy was in 1924, between 1924 and 1965. So that this notion of somehow downplaying the preconditions and exalting the opportunity and upward mobility, I think you have to be able to keep both in mind and telling the full truth of why people so often are attracted to the United States.
- [42:01]
A
Yeah, I understand that. I mean, my, my response to that would be I would want to be careful with the word precondition because the word precondition implies that the reason for all the good opportunity is the bad stuff, the slavery, the indigenous dispossession. And, and I think sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. So like in the case of there is no America without taking the lands from the Native Americans. That's true. Because like.
- [42:34]
B
Right, that's right.
- [42:35]
A
That's just, that's just two plus two. Like there, there. Either they're going to have the land or other people are going to have the land. Right. So whether it was through land purchases with cultures that didn't really recognize the concept of a purchase very much like, you know, purchasing the island of Manhattan for 2 cents or whatever it was, or whether it was through actual war or whether it was through death from smallpox and all the rest, everything in America did depend on that happening in some very literal sense. But for me, what is good about America didn't depend on slavery in the same sense. In other words, if, you know, if you play the thought experiment out and somehow Georgia and South Carolina agree to ban slavery at the inception of the country and they figure it out, they figure emancipation out, whether it's, you know, immediate or maybe gradual. To me, most of actually everything that is good about America survives that in a very straightforward way. In fact, it's enhanced because you get to unleash the creative and productive capacity of all the freed slaves. Probably you hopefully avoid the Civil War, which was a massive wealth destroying event and destabilizing event and national trauma in particular for all the places in the south that were burned to the ground. All of those people that were killed in the Civil War survive and thrive and have families and all the rest of the. And to me it looks like the trajectory of America is just a better place with even more opportunity. So I would want to be careful to say that it's a precondition in the same way that the dispossession of indigenous land was a precondition.
- [44:27]
B
I mean, there I see you making a distinction between a tight causal account versus a looser causal account. When you talk about indigenous people, it is a tight causal account. There's just no way we can conceive of X without something being in place prior. And therefore there is a cause for the fact that the presence of Europeans when in fact indigenous people's presence was there and is there no longer. Now, I agree with you. I think it is a looser causal attack account than with indigenous peoples when you talk about slavery and Jim Crow. But I still think it's a causal account, though. And one of the ways I would make that claim is that the degree to which all of the energy put into the enslavement of black folk, the degradation of black folk, generating the hatred and the terror against black folk, all of that energy had something to do with people's perception that. That what they really were after would be obtained more easily if these black folk were under control, subjugated, dominated, you see? And so I don't think we have a major disagreement there. But I would not want to use precondition as such an ambiguous notion that somehow when you talk about indigenous peoples, you got a causal account that's acceptable. But when you talk about black people's enslavement and being Jim Crow and James Crow and hated and so forth, discriminated against and degraded and what have you, that you don't have a causal account. But I don't think the two are identical. No, no, not at all. Not at all. But also, you have to keep in mind, my dear brother, the aftermath. You see, the after effects, the aftermath, the afterglow, the consequences that flow after slavery and after Jim Crow and after the lynching, especially in the minds of black people, it cuts very deep. The white supremacy inside of black people cuts deep. And if it's that deep inside of black people, you can imagine how deep it is in most white brothers and sisters. So that the aftermath of slavery and Jim Crow is something that we still have to come to terms with. I mean, you wrestle with this in your own book when you say, of course you're going to notice race. You just don't want to use race as a basis of treating others in a certain kind of way. But the very fact you have to argue that means what? Race still has a gravitas, and you've got to come up with some counter voice to somehow make sure that something deeper than race is operating in our human relations. But I agree with you at that level, of course. Very much so, yeah.
- [47:28]
A
I mean, I think one of the dangers of, well, not just the American experiment, but every country, but. But the American experiment, especially because we have so much immigration. The contours of the American racial demographic makeup are always going to be changing. The negotiations between various groups for status and for recognition of each group's unique and sacred and different taboos. Right. Every group. Every group of every subculture has its own. We have a shared value system, but we also have subcultural values. What I grew up caring about is not quite the same as what you grew up caring about. What is offensive to me is not quite the same as what is offensive to you. And we have to learn that about each other and come to some sort of gentleman's agreement about how to respect other cultures and not needlessly trample on things that are sacred to them and then in return, sort of ask for the same kind of thing. And all of that without anyone's culture negating the overall American creed. Right. Of freedom of speech and freedom of expression and democracy and all the rest. Right. So if your culture is incompatible with those things, then I guess we don't have much to talk about. But in that context, what's important is that each generation of children is raised on what I think of as the shining rhetorical moments of Martin Luther Kingism, which is to, of course, notice race, but not treat anyone differently as a result of their race. That has to be part of the American creed, part of the American civic religion, with the understanding that because of our tribal natures, we're never going to instantiate that perfectly.
- [49:42]
B
Right.
- [49:42]
A
There's always like. There is like. Like you talked about at the very beginning of this episode. As a result of our fallen nature, there's always going to be a tendency to be. To be groupish, to hate the out group.
- [49:55]
B
Absolutely.
- [49:56]
A
To make fun of fun of others, to prefer your own and all that stuff. All of that notwithstanding that. That way, the end of the Republic lies in a hundred different possible futures that we can't predict right now. Ethnic conflict is one of the great dangers. And so how do we avoid that? How do we avoid those possible futures? Is it a matter of childhood education? Is it a matter of political institutions like, what is. What is the answer there?
- [50:30]
B
No, I think that you're invoking Brother Martin is very important here, because when you invoke him, as you know, he's not an isolated individual. He Comes out a long tradition of a peoples and a community that was trying to convince people to be not necessarily colorblind, but love struck. That when love your enemy. That's what we learned on the chocolate side in our churches, you see? What do you mean, love your enemy? That means everybody made in the image of God is your brother and sister, period. How can that be? We're living in a white supremacist society. It means you cut against the grain. It means that you don't accept the white supremacist formulation as some kind of framework. And when you are love struck, you generate what the Founding Fathers knew was a precondition of any constitutional republic. Which is what? Civic virtue. You've got to learn how to respect others. You've got to learn how to acknowledge that they are who they are. Everybody's who they are, not somebody else. And therefore they have their own voice. The very anthem of black folk is what lift every voice. It's not lift every echo, because echo is just an extension of a silo that people want to control. When you find your voice, that means they're free. They're free to do what? To be wrong. They're free to disagree with you. They're free to go a different way than you go. And you have to be able to respect that, but still go your way and tell them, I disagree with you. I want to hear your argument, I want to hear your story, I want to hear your narrative. Let me tell you why I believe what I believe. You tell me what you believe, what you believe. And in the end, I. We know we may not agree, but at least we're able to engage almost like a jazz orchestra, all these different voices bouncing off against each other. But if it's just an echo that's being dictated by some kind of head of a silo, you don't have an argument. That's just indoctrination. That's just manipulation. That's just transaction. And so in that sense, civic institutions like churches and sports, it's in synagogues, it's in temples, it's in mosques, it's in. It's in schools, those crucial things. That's where the maturation civically, spiritually, morally should be taking place to help sustain a very fragile constitutional republic, which some people would call even more extensively a democracy. But I'm using the language of the Founding Fathers because they hated democracy, right? They said, if every citizen was a Socrates, the assembly will still be a mob. That's heavy language, man. It's like, oh, Lord, that's in the Federalist Papers. That's deeply anti Democratic. Sheldon Wolf and others understood that. But they had a deep, deep distrust of the Demos. And that's just the truth for most of the founding fathers. Thomas Paine was very different, but he stands in a league of his own in that sense. But your deeper point that you're making though, about the deep human connection, however you get it, you can go in a secular route. Number of our secular brothers and sisters have been quite exemplary in terms of being strong humanist. You can be Christian like King, you can be a Muslim like a later Malcolm X. Not too early. You know Malcolm, he had some growing to do. You had a love of black folks, started loving white folk.
- [54:07]
A
What do you think about the secularization of America and certainly most of Europe, a lot of other places? Do you view this as a neutral trend, just like an interesting way history has developed fewer and fewer people are Christian, or do you think that this is actually a good thing or a bad thing? Like, what do you make of that?
- [54:29]
B
Well, one, I want to make a distinction between the secularization of a people and the socratization of a people. You see, if you follow Socrates, you're talking about self criticism, which means of course you're self critical of certain forms of secularization itself. But secularization can be captured so quickly by commodification and what has happened. And I think one of the reasons why you're getting religious revival these days, especially among younger brothers and sisters of all colors, is that more and more when they say you hear secular, they hear fashions and fads of the market that take over and generate forms of conformity that push other voices out. Well, that's very real. There has been a commodification that has subsumed secularization. So that, for example, you know, if you're a student on campus, and I get this all the time, and you have to make a choice between what's going on Thursday and Friday night with all the hedonistic activity and evangelical circles meeting the same time. And you say those are the only choices to make. And you tried the first one for a year and a half and you ran into dead ends with an empty soul because you get all that joyless quest for insatiable pleasure. You say, let me try these evangelical folk. They got community, they slow down in their life. And you say those shouldn't be the only two options. But if those are the only two, then secularization has become taken by, overtaken by hedonism and narcissism and careerism. And opportunism. Is that what secularization is? Well, we know that Diderot didn't think that, Kant didn't think that, but in 21st century secularization often means that. But when you go with Socrates, Socratization means no, I'm always tied to a self criticism predicated on something in place or what the great Alfred North Whitehead called that noble discontent, but with an appreciation of the best of what has been put in place.
- [56:44]
A
All right, I just got two more questions for you, Dr. West. One, I want to know what, if anything, you learned by running for President. Because your, your, your core way of being, as someone in what I would consider to be the, the prophetic speaking tradition is something that, that's a situation where you can be inspirational, you can hold to principle without compromise, you can think single mindedly about reaching the listener in his or her soul without many other considerations. And you obviously have a talent for that combined with an erudition that allows you to bring substance to the talent. Running for political office is from what I perceive, a totally different skill set, totally different set of challenges, a set of inevitable compromises, frustrations, administrative headaches and all the rest. I'm curious, in embarking on that, what did you learn? What did you take away from it?
- [58:00]
B
Brother, you're so kind in your compliments, I can appreciate that. I aspire to what you talk about. But I did learn this though, that I was just completely overwhelmed with great inspiration. Meeting so many fellow citizens in so many different context. And I got the sense that they were thoroughly desperate, feeling helpless and hopeless and impotent in terms of trying to translate their moral sensitivities and their civic orientations into the electoral political system. And so when I would talk about the corruption of the two party system and the role of the big, big money and the big donors and big benefactors and so forth, it resonated very deeply with them. But they always felt as if we can't do anything, Brother west, do we have any translation power? And so forth and so on. And I said, well, we've got to do all that we can do. So what I discovered was on the one hand there was this hunger for. And there's a wonderful line in T.S. eliot's essay on F.H. bradley where he talks about when you reach a moment of spiritual nadir, sometimes it's a matter of struggling to preserve the very memory of what truth telling, justice seeking, integrity, honesty, decency and its fallible forms even looks like for a populace. And I believe we're at that Point. So one of the reasons I was running, I would tell folk, look, I'm running for Jesus. I'm running for justice. I'm running for president. I'm just trying to keep alive this great legacy that shaped me so that the young folk can actually see and get a glimpse maybe of what it looks like. So it's not the ordinary politician, it's not the ordinary elected official. And in the electropolitical arena, they can see something that is so very different. Not because I'm so pure pristine, but because I come out of a legacy that is more and more Alien King's legacy. The Fetty Lou Hamer, Rabbi Heschel and Edward Jayid and others. What you were saying, trying to just tell the truth, period. Not tied to any money. We were brokers of Ten Commandments every day during the campaign, as you know, Democratic Party paid $20 million to keep us off the ballot. We're still fighting. We won the case already in North Carolina. We're still fighting in Pittsburgh. We went to the Supreme Court in Pittsburgh to keep us off the ballot. I mean, so much for defending different voices and hearing different voices, right? So that. That to me, was something that was worth it because it was part of my own sense of calling and my own sense of vocation. But you're absolutely right in terms of a different set of skills for organizing, dealing with the huge bureaucracies that are in place in order to sustain campaigns. Sister Kiana and Anahita, my beloved wife and the campaign manager, Keanu, they did magnificent jobs. But for me, it was a matter of just prophetic witness. That's really what it was about. And I got such wonderful responses. And of course, I was trashed by the Democratic Party and Obama's people and Clinton's people and Biden's people. You the worst things. I'm just trying to tell the truth. You don't want to come to terms with the foreign policy and these drones. You don't want to come terms with genocide in Gaza or however you characterize genocide. That's the Democrats. That's not just the Republicans. I'm looking at both of these parties. Oh, you must be working for Trump. Oh, please. Calling it brother gangster for the last 15 years, the Neo fascist sensibilities, that's not the question at all. But I keep track of his humanity. See, I'm not into just demonizing anybody from the Klan to Trump. I confronted that in Charlottesville when I was down there with those sick white brothers coming at me tooth and nail. And they talking about aren't you that brother on television call everybody brother? I said, yes, brother. He said, I can't stand that. Don't call me brother. I said, I don't ask for anybody's permission as to who I love. I'm a Jesus loving, free black man. I try to love everybody, period. I don't care who gets unhappy. I don't care what the consequences are. I'm not in this for popularity. That's not my tradition. J.J. johnson wasn't blowing for money. He needed it. But he wasn't just blowing for money. He trying to play his horn the same way Charlie Parker played it. You don't play the trombone that way. I'm trying to be true to my artistic art, integrity. I'm a free man. That's a great tradition, and that's very important for a young brother like yourself. I'm Coleman, period. I'm true to my mama, God bless her, I know she passed. I'm true to my father. I'm true to my sisters. I'm true to myself. I'm trying to be better. I'm listening, I'm learning. I'm not static. But don't dictate to me who I love, how I laugh, or how I orient myself in the world, period. Drop the mic.
- [63:32]
A
I love that. All right, well, I don't want to get into the genocide in Gaza because I. I think we disagree on that, but I don't want to open the whole can of worms, and I've done too many podcasts about that subject recently, so I'll. I just want to flag that.
- [63:47]
B
Oh, no, no, sure.
- [63:48]
A
Move on to the question.
- [63:49]
B
We could have a whole separate debate on that, though.
- [63:51]
A
But I want to get to the question. Final question. I actually want to hear from Dr. Cornell west on. And the reason I'm thinking about this is because Drake just released an album where he, you know, predictably and expectedly had a lot to say about the beef with. With Kendrick.
- [64:14]
B
Oh, brother. Kendrick.
- [64:14]
A
And I. I really want to know what you think of the Drake Kendrick beef. A. You know, it's. It's almost two years old now, but now it's. It's back. Did you pay attention to it? Did. Did it mean anything to you more profound than two individuals that are at the top of their game and don't like each other? Is there anything about it that struck the culture at a deeper level because of what Drake and Kendrick represent? What do you make of it?
- [64:50]
B
Yeah, no, I appreciate that question, too, because I think it's very important for us to Always view music in particular, art in general, not as marginal and peripheral phenomena. At least for me. Music has been integral and constitutive as to who I am in the same way philosophical text and the same way my own biblically centered religious tradition is, and so on. One is that I have a great love and respect for both of those brothers. I think that they are artistic giant in their own distinctive ways. I think Kendrick has a certain kind of genius that Drake doesn't have. But I think Drake's unbelievable versatility and his talent is just so immense. And of course, I recall when he embraced Kendrick, when Kendrick was a young artist, took him on tour and so forth. See, those kinds of things mean much to me in terms of the debts that we have with each other. It doesn't mean you can't be critical, but you just have to acknowledge a certain kind of character on Drake's partner. As you know, Drake's father out of Oakland, who is the brother of Larry Graham. So he's got deep connection to Sly Stone, he got deep connection to genius on the chocolate side of the Bay Area. Then he's got his vanilla Canadian mother who did a magnificent job on that brother. Because from a distance, Drake strikes me as a very, very kind human being. I never met him, I don't know him. I've never had conversations with him. I never met Kendrick either. So that when the beef hit, I wasn't crazy about it. Of course, my first thing I say is, neither one of you black folk are Tupac or Biggie. Let's just keep this in mind. You've got tremendous genius, but you know, others proceed you, they would then acknowledge that. Ain't no doubt about that. Well, let's just keep this in mind because artistic excellence is artistic excellence. You all exemplify it, but there's levels of it higher than you. The second thing to keep in mind is how what optics are at play. Because, see, it started to degenerate into this ugly and vicious name calling, ad hominem attack on their persons and so forth. I hated that. I hate to see that kind of thing going on. And yet, you know, that was part and parcel of what made the beef so attractive and appealing to a lot of people. Now, I haven't heard the new album by Drake. I have no idea what kind of state of mind he's in. I don't know what kind of response it is, whether it's a spiritually mature one or spiritually immature one. I just don't know. I expect, I hope, of a spiritually mature response to it. But you do have to defend yourself, no doubt about that. You can't just get beat up and not have some kind of response. Not at all. I just hope that people can see the artistic excellence in and beyond the beef so that the beef itself doesn't become just another moment for commodification of hip hop as opposed to a serious engagement of the subject matter of hip hop, which is basically what it means to be human under certain kinds of conditions of young folk who are trying to the best of their ability to proceed from mama's womb to tomb with some kind of integrity.
- [68:44]
A
All right, thank you so much, Dr. West, for coming on my show. Happy birthday to this great country, and you're the perfect guest to deal with this moment with. And, you know, people know where to find you so they can find you. And thank you so much for coming on the show, brother.
- [69:02]
B
You stay strong, though, man. Stay strong indeed. Thanks. Thanks for having me though, man. Definitely.