[blind-democracy] Re: Here's the entire interview

  • From: Carl Jarvis <carjar82@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2015 07:51:38 -0700

Thankks Miriam,
I'll be eager to listen to this when I return home this evening.

Carl Jarvis

On 8/7/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Chris Hedges Interviews Cornel West On Black Prophetic Tradition |
PopularResistance.Org

Chris Hedges Interviews Cornel West On Black Prophetic Tradition |
PopularResistance.Org frame
popularresistance.org
https://www.popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-interviews-cornel-west-on-the
-black-prophetic-tradition/

Chris Hedges Interviews Cornel West On Black Prophetic Tradition

Bio
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on
Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central
America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more
than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National
Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he
was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He has written nine books,
including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the
best-selling
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His
book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is
the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He
graduated
Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D.
in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary,
Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and
edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy
Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He
appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN and C-Span
as
well as on his dear Brother, Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show. He can be heard
weekly with Tavis Smiley on “Smiley & West”, the national public radio
program distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

Transcript

[music plays]

CHRIS HEDGES, HOST, DAYS OF REVOLT: Hi. I’m Chris Hedges. Welcome to Days
of
Revolt. The song you’ve been listening to is by Willie King, Willie King
and
the Liberators, “Terrorized”, written after the events of 9/11 in response
to the outcry, mostly by white society, that this was the first attack of
terror on American soil. King sings, don’t talk to me of terror, I’ve been
terrorized all my days.

I’m here with Dr. Cornel West, that great defender of the black prophetic
tradition, I think the most important intellectual tradition in American
society. And we’re going to discuss that tradition as he’s laid out in his
great book Black Prophetic Fire.

Thank you, Dr. West.

WEST: What a blessing to be here with you, my dear brother. I salute your
wonderful new show, Days of Revolt, also your powerful new [incompr.], The
Wages of the Rebellion.

HEDGES: Thank you. Well, you’re my first two guests.

WEST: What a blessing. What a blessing.

HEDGES: So let’s talk about this. In the book you profile some of the great
figures of the black prophetic tradition, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm, Ella
Baker, Martin Luther King, of course, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells.
What
is, how do you define the black prophetic tradition?

WEST: Well, I think in many ways it’s embodied in that wonderful song by
brother Willie King and the Liberators. If the blues is defined as a
personal narrative of catastrophe lyrically expressed, then what you really
have, you have a catastrophe of white supremacy, slavery, the catastrophe
of
Jim and Jane Crow senior, the catastrophes of Jim and Jane Crow juniors.
And
the black prophetic tradition is simply one that says in the face of that
catastrophe, we’ve got to analytically understand it, we’ve got to
prophetically bear witness, and we’ve got to generate forms of fightback
that organize and mobilize, beginning on the chocolate sides of town, but
also embracing all freedom fighters of all colors. So a Frederick Douglass
working with William Lloyd Garrison and Ida B. Wells working for
antiterrorist, antilynching groups, not just here but in Britain as well,
all the way up to Malcolm and Martin and Ella Baker, so that in a sense
what
we’re really saying is that these towering figures who exemplify integrity,
honesty, and decency, that they’re trying to get us to come to terms with a
people, my own folk, my tradition, who’ve been terrorized, traumatized, and
stigmatized for 400 years.

And here’s the best of the response. Black church, prophetic, antiterrorist
institutions, black music, prophetic, antiterrorist, anti-trauma. How do
you
straighten your back up? How do you tell the truth? How do you bear
witness?
How do you organize? How do you mobilize? How do you generate forms of
resistance and resiliency in the face of some very, very ugly forms of
terror and trauma and stigma?

WEST: One of the things about the black prophetic tradition which I look at
as somebody who writes a lot about empire is that that has been the major
intellectual force in American society in terms of its critique and
understanding of empire, I think largely because African Americans have
suffered internally the effects of empire, so that they understand
externally what poor people who are subjugated, often poor people of color,
are enduring on the outer reaches of empire.

WEST: There’s no doubt that when you wrestle with the vicious legacy of
white supremacy, that you’re going to sooner or later have to engage in a
critique of capitalism, of imperialism. You hope that you get the vicious
legacies of male supremacy and homophobia. But you’re going to–it’s going
to
situate you right at the center of the operations of power in wrestling
with
his legacy of white supremacy.

Now, there are some and too many black figures that want to say, well, the
original sin of America was slavery. And that’s a lie. That’s not true. The
white supremacist beginnings of this nation really had to do with
indigenous
peoples, a violation of their humanity, the dispossession of their lands,
and so on. But it’s true that enslaved Africans will become the generators
of wealth based on exploited labor. That will be the precondition for
American democracy, so that when you look at genocidal attacks on the one
hand and enslavement of Africans on the other, you’ve got two fundamental
pillars which constitute the lens through which you look at the history of
this nation. And that’s the best of the black prophetic tradition.

HEDGES: Which is why the black prophetic tradition has traditionally been
antimilitarist.

WEST: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

HEDGES: And that’s been, I think–well, I don’t know if you would agree, but
I think that’s been one of the most important contributions, because we
have
very few critiques of imperial power. We did through figures like Debs and
through some of the anarchists, but there’s been a consistency with the
black prophetic tradition that has warned America, I think, about its
adventurism and its notion of exceptionalism and its propensity to use
violence, both internally and externally, to promote its supposed virtues.

WEST: Absolutely. Look at somebody like Ella Baker, who deserves so much
more attention. She spends so much of her years, her later years, with the
Puerto Rican independence movement with Albizu Campos and Oscar López
Rivera, still a political prisoner today. She makes the connection between
struggling against white supremacy in the States and struggling against
U.S.
colonialism on the island of Puerto Rico. So that critique of empire, white
supremacy, always interwoven, always intermingling in the best sense.

But I think in our day and time, though–and this is what this book is very
much about; it’s a love letter to the younger generation in our age of
Ferguson and Baltimore and Staten Island and Cleveland and Oakland and
so–and Charleston, North Charleston and Charleston. And what I mean by that
is to say, young people, you are waking up in a magnificent way from your
sleepwalking. But there’s a magnificent tradition that constitutes wind at
your back.

You’re not going to get it in corporate media, you’re not going to get it
in
mainstream discourse. The neoliberals who dominate corporate media, they
want to financialize, privatize, and militarize. Lo and behold, the black
prophetic tradition says, no, we’re critical of pro-Wall Street policy that
generate more capitalist wealth and inequality. When it comes to
privatizing, no, we want public life. We want a sense of what we hold in
common, including at the workplace vis-à-vis bosses, oftentimes just run
amok with corporate greed. And the same would be true in terms of
militarize. That’s part of the anti-militarism that you rightly talk about
that goes hand-in-hand with anti-imperialism.

And so somebody like Martin King, who of course reaches this point with
tremendous eloquence in the last three years of his life, what does he have
to do? He has to cut against the grain: 72 percent of Americans disapprove
of him; 55 percent of black people disapprove of Martin.

HEDGES: And you write in the book, since the assassination of Martin Luther
King Jr., it is clear that something has died in black America.

WEST: Absolutely. Absolutely.

HEDGES: What’s died?

WEST: What died was a sense of we consciousness. The market mentality took
over, the I consciousness, the narcissistic, predatory, careeristic,
opportunistic proclivities took over.

HEDGES: How did that happen?

WEST: It, one, was the vicious attack on the black freedom movement, of
which they either killed so many of the leaders or they incarcerated so
many
of the leaders. And what was left–

HEDGES: Which–and I think we should stop there and just say we’re talking
about hundreds, hundreds, which I think most people who don’t examine the
system of mass incarceration–we still have 150 black revolutionaries–Mumia
Abu-Jamal, whom you and I visited–.

WEST: Absolutely, with brother Jim Cone.

HEDGES: You–with brother Jim–great theologian James Cone. But we have–there
was a conscious effort by the state to destroy those torchbearers.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And they did.

WEST: Well, they didn’t destroy them. They pushed back.

HEDGES: Or silenced them, let’s say.

WEST: That’s right. They pushed back, because, I mean, Mumia Abu-Jamal is
still as strong. We know that. Assata Shakur is still strong in Cuba. There
are a number of powerful, grassroot, local activists who are still strong.

But in terms of the national presence of the black prophetic tradition,
look
at Jeremiah Wright. Vicious attacks trying to demonize him and somehow
dampen his spirit as we moved into the culmination of the highly
individualistic, narcissistic proclivities of black professional class,
which is, of course, the first black president.

HEDGES: Well, and you’re very critical of this class, and you see it as a
very destructive force. Would it be fair to say that there are two
principal
strains, the black prophetic tradition and the Booker T. Washington
accommodationist tradition? Would it be too much of a stretch to say that
figures like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Mr. Coates from The Atlantic, who
you have called out, I think, recently, do they veer more towards the
Booker
T. Washington tradition? Or is it different? They’ve certainly walked away
from the black prophetic tradition.

WEST: Yeah, they certainly walked away from the black prophetic. I think
what you get, though, the black neoliberal tradition, which would still not
necessarily be the same as Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington
really
goes straight to Clarence Thomas. He’s actually deeply conservative. He did
some wonderful things for black people on an individual level, with
Tuskegee, with white money, and so on, but he’s deeply conservative. He’s
anti-labor, his anti-immigration, and so forth.

HEDGES: Well, he–and he would not announce lynching.

WEST: Edit least publicly he wouldn’t–and therefore Ida B. Wells has to run
right into the fire with unbelievable courage.

But, no, the neoliberal one is one that comes out of the civil rights
movement, in which you get the formation of a black professional class that
acts as if they’re prophetic, who really convince themselves they’re
progressive, when in fact they’re so tied to capital–.

HEDGES: Right. The lumpen bourgeoisie.

WEST: The lumpen bourgeoisie. Absolutely.

HEDGES: Is that a Cornel West term?

WEST: No. That comes out of E. Franklin Frazier’s great text The Black
Bourgeoisie. You see. Absolutely. It’s a middle-class beneath the American
middle class, with less capital, less credit, less power.

HEDGES: But its aspirations–.

WEST: But the aspirations are intense and want to somehow act as if they’re
tied to Malcolm. I mean, the peace by brother Coates a few years ago said
that brother Barack Obama was part of the culminating expression of Malcolm
X, now, that is about as wrong–that’s like saying I come out of the Beach
Boys. You know what I mean? And Malcolm’s legacy had nothing to do with
Barack Obama.

Barack Obama comes out of a highly cultivated black professional class
that’s tied to neoliberal policies of Wall Street domination, drones, which
are U.S. war crimes, massive surveillance, so COINTELPRO on steroids, every
day, keeping track of what we do and so forth. What that is is in fact a
culmination of not just black professional class; it’s a professional class
in contemporary monopoly capitalist America, you see. And so it’s
pro-imperialist. It acts as if it’s antiracist. And it is antiracist within
a very narrow bourgeois liberal order. But when it comes to massive
unemployment, massive underemployment, decrepit housing, dealing with this
unbelievably–what’s the right word with our educational system? Let’s say
soul-murdering educational system, you see. Where is the structural
critique? Hardly at all. And when it comes to the Middle East, for example,
if you can get a black neoliberal to say that the killing of 500 precious
Palestinian babies is a crime against humanity, it would be fascinating to
see that take place. It will never take place.

HEDGES: You write that Obama displaces, is part of this process that’s
displacing the black prophetic tradition. And one gets a sense from your
book that you’re worried that–you know, and you certainly stand up in
defense of this tradition, but one gets a sense from the book that you’re
worried that these forces are so powerful that they may extinguish it.

WEST: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. That’s why I fight so vehemently. You
know, people say, oh, you hate the president. No, no, no. I love black
people, I love black freedom, I love the black prophetic tradition. And
when
you have someone who is displacing it–and this is true for intellectuals as
well, neoliberal intellectuals who act as if they’re coming out of the
black
prophetic tradition, and in fact they are calling it into question, and
oftentimes suffocating it, if not destroying it.

And see, for me, that means I’ve got to come out swinging, come out
swinging, you see. Why? Because, one, it’s the tradition that produced what
I try to do in my life. Black people themselves, especially the black poor,
especially the black masses, always connected to other poor, other masses,
here and around the world, it’s the only real hope that we have of telling
the truth, bearing witness, and making sure that the Jamal and Leticias on
the corner are not overlooked as the black professionals that breakdancing
at the top as they break glass ceilings day in and day out.

HEDGES: Well, you also write–and I think this is true, that–the primary
tradition that has contributed to the renewal and regeneration of American
democracy.

WEST: Oh, yes.

HEDGES: And I think that’s right.

WEST: Oh, yeah. Oh, no. The black prophetic tradition, the black freedom
struggle is the leaven in the American democratic loaf. You see, when you
have a conception of democracy from the vantage point of the slave, then it
looks different than Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder. Then it looks different
from George Washington, slaveholder. It looks different in Abraham Lincoln,
who fought colonization of black people, going to other parts outside of
the
United States up until 1862.

So when you have that conception, then you’ve got what Du Bois, the great
Du
Bois, called the reconstruction of freedom, the reconstruction of democracy
from the vantage point of those below. And we must also, of course, always
embrace our indigenous brothers and sisters and make sure that their land
rights, make sure that their humanity and dignity are thoroughly affirmed.

HEDGES: Which makes Du Bois maybe the most important intellectual in
American history.

WEST: He is the greatest public intellectual in the history of the American
empire. No doubt about it.

HEDGES: Because like the Jews in Europe at the time of fascism, he had that
intellectual brilliance, which you carry, but also as a black man stood far
enough away from the centers of power, and was certainly by the end of his
life a victim of that power, that he understood how power worked in a way
that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr I think finally did not.

WEST: Well, James Cone’s laid bare the truth about Reinhold Niebuhr.
There’s
a wonderful play by the great Amira Baraka, the last play that he wrote I
just saw just a few weeks ago, The Most Dangerous Man in America, is about
Du Bois’s trial, February 1951, when he comes in in handcuffs at the age of
83 years old. Hardly anybody would touch him. NAACP has already kicked them
out. Why? Because he says, I’m not going to capitulate to the Cold War and
become just a domestic liberal; I am a freedom fighter with connections to
various freedom movements in Africa and other parts of the world.

HEDGES: Well, and we should be clear, and I can’t remember whether it’s
from
this book or not, but the NAACP was set up as a counterweight to more
radical elements, and in particular the Communist Party.

WEST: After World War II, Gerald Horne and Robin Kelly and the other fine
truth telling historians lay it out. And when Paul Robison attends the 31
Grace court in Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn, the best borough in the world,
it’s just the two of them, Paul Robison under house arrest. The most
popular
Negro in the world in 1939, he’s under house arrest. Du Bois basically
under
house arrest, passport taken. They’re in dialog. There’s John Killens.
There’s Harry Belafonte coming in every once in a while. That’s the Du
Bois,
that is the Paul Robison that our young folk in Ferguson, young folk in
Baltimore, they need to be attune to the vision and courage, because we are
catching up with them. The American empire is in deep trouble.

HEDGES: Can I read this passage from “The Souls of White Folks”, from your
book, by Du Bois.

WEST: Sure. Yeah. It’s Du Bois’s language. But yes.

HEDGES: It’s Du Bois. It’s Du Bois.

WEST: That’s right. The great Du Bois.

HEDGES: “It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on
herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral
protagonist
in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or
more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human
hatred,–making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and
making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,–rather a
great religion, a world war-cry. . . .”

Now, Muslims in the Middle East would understand that language.

WEST: Oh, absolutely. And that is the terrorism that brother Willie King’s
singing about with such power.

HEDGES: But it’s a terrorism that Americans are largely–

WEST: In denial about.

HEDGES: In denial, and certainly the corporate media institutions have
blocked from view quite effectively.

WEST: Absolutely. Absolutely. But we’re living at a time in which with this
escalating visibility of police terror and police murder, with hardly any
police going to jail, no serious accountability, and most importantly with
the marvelous new militancy of the young brothers and sisters of all
colors,
but disproportionately chocolate, who have broken the back of fear–you see,
once you break the back of fear and say, I am not afraid any longer, I am
willing to bear witness, put my body on the line, go to jail–and this is
exactly what we’ve seen.

HEDGES: But that killing’s not new. I mean, for decades black people have
been–I mean, American society, maybe because of video that’s been leaked,
you know, they’re shocked.

WEST: That’s right.

HEDGES: But black people have been killed at this rate for decades.

WEST: Absolutely. But when you have a wave of resistance–you see, we just
had the wonderful march at Newark, my dear brother Larry Hamm, People’s
Organization for Progress. We’re going to have a major march here in New
York city October 24, brother Carl Dix and myself. And even my dear brother
Minister Louis Farrakhan, who is controversial, especially among a lot of
progressives who wonder why it is that the minister Louis Farrakhan still
has a presence, but he has a strong presence in terms of keeping track of
the terrorism coming at black folk. He’s going to have a 20th anniversary
of
the Million Man March that’s part of all the different, ideologically
variegated expressions of how do you keep track of white supremacy and its
ugly effects, you see. That’s escalating.

And that’s a beautiful thing, because the system now is just decrepit. You
know, the two-party system is as weak as it can be. You’ve got escalating
ecological catastrophe. You’ve got increasing nuclear catastrophe. You’ve
got the economic catastrophe in terms of the wealth inequality that brother
Bernie Sanders and others talk about. You’ve got the moral catastrophe of–.

HEDGES: He won’t talk about empire, though.

WEST: Now, we’ve got to put some pressure on brother Bernie in that regard.
And I think that–.

HEDGES: And he won’t talk about the Palestinians, and he won’t take on the
military.

WEST: I think he’s more and more open to a critique of the Israeli
occupation. I think he at the same time has to somehow walk a tightrope
between the liberals who are excited about him. But thank God he’s talking
about Wall Street domination.

HEDGES: He’s raising real issues. Yes, he is.

So I want to close this segment. We’re going to talk in the next segment
about what’s happened to the black prophetic tradition. But you have a
quote
in the book where you write about Ella Baker as saying that political
change
is not primarily politically motivated. And I think one of the strengths of
the black prophetic tradition is that it–especially because it has
confronted these frightening monolithic forces–white supremacy, lethal
violence, terror itself, discrimination in all of its forms, institutional,
economic–it sustains itself finally through an element of faith. And I
wonder if you could address that.

WEST: Yeah. I think that when you talk about loving poor people, loving
black people, loving gay brothers, lesbian sisters, and loving Palestinians
vis-à-vis Israeli occupation, or loving Jewish brothers and sisters
vis-à-vis a Hitler, that that’s not just a political resistance. That’s a
deep moral and spiritual form that highlights power and the operations of
power. And there’s no way you can sustain your movements over time based
solely on political calculation or motivation. Something deeper–compassion,
empathy. And for my tradition, the black tradition, because music has been
the privileged form of expression, there’s a sonic dimension to it, you
see,
so that the Donny Hathaways and the Marvin Gayes and the Nina Simones and
the John Coltranes and Max Roaches, they are as much love warriors and
freedom fighters as was Malcolm X, as was Martin Luther King, as was Ella
Baker.

HEDGES: Which is–and Baldwin, when he writes about Malcolm, he writes about
how gentle Malcolm was.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And he was one of the gentlest people he’d ever met.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And I think they gets to the core of it, because when you love
those
people, you cannot betray them.

WEST: You can’t betray them.

HEDGES: And if you can’t betray them, it doesn’t matter what they throw at
you. And that is the power of, I think, your work and is the power of that
prophetic tradition.

WEST: Which is the power of the tradition I’m just a small part of. But I’m
going to go down fighting defending that tradition, even given the folk who
try to lie about it.

HEDGES: Thank God you’re here. Thank you very much.

WEST: Yeah. Well, I’m blessed, I’m blessed, my brother.

HEDGES: So stay tuned. We’re going to come back next week and talk to Dr.
West about what’s happened to the black prophetic tradition, the assault
that has been carried out to essentially shut down its voice, and why he is
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Chris Hedges Interviews Cornel West On Black Prophetic Tradition

Bio
Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on
Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central
America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more
than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor,
National
Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he
was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. He has written nine books,
including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
Spectacle” (2009), “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” (2008) and the
best-selling
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2008). His
book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003) was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is
the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He
graduated
Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D.
in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary,
Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and
edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy
Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He
appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN and C-Span
as
well as on his dear Brother, Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show. He can be heard
weekly with Tavis Smiley on “Smiley & West”, the national public radio
program distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

Transcript

[music plays]

CHRIS HEDGES, HOST, DAYS OF REVOLT: Hi. I’m Chris Hedges. Welcome to Days
of
Revolt. The song you’ve been listening to is by Willie King, Willie King
and
the Liberators, “Terrorized”, written after the events of 9/11 in response
to the outcry, mostly by white society, that this was the first attack of
terror on American soil. King sings, don’t talk to me of terror, I’ve been
terrorized all my days.

I’m here with Dr. Cornel West, that great defender of the black prophetic
tradition, I think the most important intellectual tradition in American
society. And we’re going to discuss that tradition as he’s laid out in his
great book Black Prophetic Fire.

Thank you, Dr. West.

WEST: What a blessing to be here with you, my dear brother. I salute your
wonderful new show, Days of Revolt, also your powerful new [incompr.], The
Wages of the Rebellion.

HEDGES: Thank you. Well, you’re my first two guests.

WEST: What a blessing. What a blessing.

HEDGES: So let’s talk about this. In the book you profile some of the great
figures of the black prophetic tradition, W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm, Ella
Baker, Martin Luther King, of course, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells.
What
is, how do you define the black prophetic tradition?

WEST: Well, I think in many ways it’s embodied in that wonderful song by
brother Willie King and the Liberators. If the blues is defined as a
personal narrative of catastrophe lyrically expressed, then what you really
have, you have a catastrophe of white supremacy, slavery, the catastrophe
of
Jim and Jane Crow senior, the catastrophes of Jim and Jane Crow juniors.
And
the black prophetic tradition is simply one that says in the face of that
catastrophe, we’ve got to analytically understand it, we’ve got to
prophetically bear witness, and we’ve got to generate forms of fightback
that organize and mobilize, beginning on the chocolate sides of town, but
also embracing all freedom fighters of all colors. So a Frederick Douglass
working with William Lloyd Garrison and Ida B. Wells working for
antiterrorist, antilynching groups, not just here but in Britain as well,
all the way up to Malcolm and Martin and Ella Baker, so that in a sense
what
we’re really saying is that these towering figures who exemplify integrity,
honesty, and decency, that they’re trying to get us to come to terms with a
people, my own folk, my tradition, who’ve been terrorized, traumatized, and
stigmatized for 400 years.

And here’s the best of the response. Black church, prophetic, antiterrorist
institutions, black music, prophetic, antiterrorist, anti-trauma. How do
you
straighten your back up? How do you tell the truth? How do you bear
witness?
How do you organize? How do you mobilize? How do you generate forms of
resistance and resiliency in the face of some very, very ugly forms of
terror and trauma and stigma?

WEST: One of the things about the black prophetic tradition which I look at
as somebody who writes a lot about empire is that that has been the major
intellectual force in American society in terms of its critique and
understanding of empire, I think largely because African Americans have
suffered internally the effects of empire, so that they understand
externally what poor people who are subjugated, often poor people of color,
are enduring on the outer reaches of empire.

WEST: There’s no doubt that when you wrestle with the vicious legacy of
white supremacy, that you’re going to sooner or later have to engage in a
critique of capitalism, of imperialism. You hope that you get the vicious
legacies of male supremacy and homophobia. But you’re going to–it’s going
to
situate you right at the center of the operations of power in wrestling
with
his legacy of white supremacy.

Now, there are some and too many black figures that want to say, well, the
original sin of America was slavery. And that’s a lie. That’s not true. The
white supremacist beginnings of this nation really had to do with
indigenous
peoples, a violation of their humanity, the dispossession of their lands,
and so on. But it’s true that enslaved Africans will become the generators
of wealth based on exploited labor. That will be the precondition for
American democracy, so that when you look at genocidal attacks on the one
hand and enslavement of Africans on the other, you’ve got two fundamental
pillars which constitute the lens through which you look at the history of
this nation. And that’s the best of the black prophetic tradition.

HEDGES: Which is why the black prophetic tradition has traditionally been
antimilitarist.

WEST: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

HEDGES: And that’s been, I think–well, I don’t know if you would agree, but
I think that’s been one of the most important contributions, because we
have
very few critiques of imperial power. We did through figures like Debs and
through some of the anarchists, but there’s been a consistency with the
black prophetic tradition that has warned America, I think, about its
adventurism and its notion of exceptionalism and its propensity to use
violence, both internally and externally, to promote its supposed virtues.

WEST: Absolutely. Look at somebody like Ella Baker, who deserves so much
more attention. She spends so much of her years, her later years, with the
Puerto Rican independence movement with Albizu Campos and Oscar López
Rivera, still a political prisoner today. She makes the connection between
struggling against white supremacy in the States and struggling against
U.S.
colonialism on the island of Puerto Rico. So that critique of empire, white
supremacy, always interwoven, always intermingling in the best sense.

But I think in our day and time, though–and this is what this book is very
much about; it’s a love letter to the younger generation in our age of
Ferguson and Baltimore and Staten Island and Cleveland and Oakland and
so–and Charleston, North Charleston and Charleston. And what I mean by that
is to say, young people, you are waking up in a magnificent way from your
sleepwalking. But there’s a magnificent tradition that constitutes wind at
your back.

You’re not going to get it in corporate media, you’re not going to get it
in
mainstream discourse. The neoliberals who dominate corporate media, they
want to financialize, privatize, and militarize. Lo and behold, the black
prophetic tradition says, no, we’re critical of pro-Wall Street policy that
generate more capitalist wealth and inequality. When it comes to
privatizing, no, we want public life. We want a sense of what we hold in
common, including at the workplace vis-à-vis bosses, oftentimes just run
amok with corporate greed. And the same would be true in terms of
militarize. That’s part of the anti-militarism that you rightly talk about
that goes hand-in-hand with anti-imperialism.

And so somebody like Martin King, who of course reaches this point with
tremendous eloquence in the last three years of his life, what does he have
to do? He has to cut against the grain: 72 percent of Americans disapprove
of him; 55 percent of black people disapprove of Martin.

HEDGES: And you write in the book, since the assassination of Martin Luther
King Jr., it is clear that something has died in black America.

WEST: Absolutely. Absolutely.

HEDGES: What’s died?

WEST: What died was a sense of we consciousness. The market mentality took
over, the I consciousness, the narcissistic, predatory, careeristic,
opportunistic proclivities took over.

HEDGES: How did that happen?

WEST: It, one, was the vicious attack on the black freedom movement, of
which they either killed so many of the leaders or they incarcerated so
many
of the leaders. And what was left–

HEDGES: Which–and I think we should stop there and just say we’re talking
about hundreds, hundreds, which I think most people who don’t examine the
system of mass incarceration–we still have 150 black revolutionaries–Mumia
Abu-Jamal, whom you and I visited–.

WEST: Absolutely, with brother Jim Cone.

HEDGES: You–with brother Jim–great theologian James Cone. But we have–there
was a conscious effort by the state to destroy those torchbearers.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And they did.

WEST: Well, they didn’t destroy them. They pushed back.

HEDGES: Or silenced them, let’s say.

WEST: That’s right. They pushed back, because, I mean, Mumia Abu-Jamal is
still as strong. We know that. Assata Shakur is still strong in Cuba. There
are a number of powerful, grassroot, local activists who are still strong.

But in terms of the national presence of the black prophetic tradition,
look
at Jeremiah Wright. Vicious attacks trying to demonize him and somehow
dampen his spirit as we moved into the culmination of the highly
individualistic, narcissistic proclivities of black professional class,
which is, of course, the first black president.

HEDGES: Well, and you’re very critical of this class, and you see it as a
very destructive force. Would it be fair to say that there are two
principal
strains, the black prophetic tradition and the Booker T. Washington
accommodationist tradition? Would it be too much of a stretch to say that
figures like Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Mr. Coates from The Atlantic, who
you have called out, I think, recently, do they veer more towards the
Booker
T. Washington tradition? Or is it different? They’ve certainly walked away
from the black prophetic tradition.

WEST: Yeah, they certainly walked away from the black prophetic. I think
what you get, though, the black neoliberal tradition, which would still not
necessarily be the same as Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington
really
goes straight to Clarence Thomas. He’s actually deeply conservative. He did
some wonderful things for black people on an individual level, with
Tuskegee, with white money, and so on, but he’s deeply conservative. He’s
anti-labor, his anti-immigration, and so forth.

HEDGES: Well, he–and he would not announce lynching.

WEST: Edit least publicly he wouldn’t–and therefore Ida B. Wells has to run
right into the fire with unbelievable courage.

But, no, the neoliberal one is one that comes out of the civil rights
movement, in which you get the formation of a black professional class that
acts as if they’re prophetic, who really convince themselves they’re
progressive, when in fact they’re so tied to capital–.

HEDGES: Right. The lumpen bourgeoisie.

WEST: The lumpen bourgeoisie. Absolutely.

HEDGES: Is that a Cornel West term?

WEST: No. That comes out of E. Franklin Frazier’s great text The Black
Bourgeoisie. You see. Absolutely. It’s a middle-class beneath the American
middle class, with less capital, less credit, less power.

HEDGES: But its aspirations–.

WEST: But the aspirations are intense and want to somehow act as if they’re
tied to Malcolm. I mean, the peace by brother Coates a few years ago said
that brother Barack Obama was part of the culminating expression of Malcolm
X, now, that is about as wrong–that’s like saying I come out of the Beach
Boys. You know what I mean? And Malcolm’s legacy had nothing to do with
Barack Obama.

Barack Obama comes out of a highly cultivated black professional class
that’s tied to neoliberal policies of Wall Street domination, drones, which
are U.S. war crimes, massive surveillance, so COINTELPRO on steroids, every
day, keeping track of what we do and so forth. What that is is in fact a
culmination of not just black professional class; it’s a professional class
in contemporary monopoly capitalist America, you see. And so it’s
pro-imperialist. It acts as if it’s antiracist. And it is antiracist within
a very narrow bourgeois liberal order. But when it comes to massive
unemployment, massive underemployment, decrepit housing, dealing with this
unbelievably–what’s the right word with our educational system? Let’s say
soul-murdering educational system, you see. Where is the structural
critique? Hardly at all. And when it comes to the Middle East, for example,
if you can get a black neoliberal to say that the killing of 500 precious
Palestinian babies is a crime against humanity, it would be fascinating to
see that take place. It will never take place.

HEDGES: You write that Obama displaces, is part of this process that’s
displacing the black prophetic tradition. And one gets a sense from your
book that you’re worried that–you know, and you certainly stand up in
defense of this tradition, but one gets a sense from the book that you’re
worried that these forces are so powerful that they may extinguish it.

WEST: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. That’s why I fight so vehemently. You
know, people say, oh, you hate the president. No, no, no. I love black
people, I love black freedom, I love the black prophetic tradition. And
when
you have someone who is displacing it–and this is true for intellectuals as
well, neoliberal intellectuals who act as if they’re coming out of the
black
prophetic tradition, and in fact they are calling it into question, and
oftentimes suffocating it, if not destroying it.

And see, for me, that means I’ve got to come out swinging, come out
swinging, you see. Why? Because, one, it’s the tradition that produced what
I try to do in my life. Black people themselves, especially the black poor,
especially the black masses, always connected to other poor, other masses,
here and around the world, it’s the only real hope that we have of telling
the truth, bearing witness, and making sure that the Jamal and Leticias on
the corner are not overlooked as the black professionals that breakdancing
at the top as they break glass ceilings day in and day out.

HEDGES: Well, you also write–and I think this is true, that–the primary
tradition that has contributed to the renewal and regeneration of American
democracy.

WEST: Oh, yes.

HEDGES: And I think that’s right.

WEST: Oh, yeah. Oh, no. The black prophetic tradition, the black freedom
struggle is the leaven in the American democratic loaf. You see, when you
have a conception of democracy from the vantage point of the slave, then it
looks different than Thomas Jefferson, slaveholder. Then it looks different
from George Washington, slaveholder. It looks different in Abraham Lincoln,
who fought colonization of black people, going to other parts outside of
the
United States up until 1862.

So when you have that conception, then you’ve got what Du Bois, the great
Du
Bois, called the reconstruction of freedom, the reconstruction of democracy
from the vantage point of those below. And we must also, of course, always
embrace our indigenous brothers and sisters and make sure that their land
rights, make sure that their humanity and dignity are thoroughly affirmed.

HEDGES: Which makes Du Bois maybe the most important intellectual in
American history.

WEST: He is the greatest public intellectual in the history of the American
empire. No doubt about it.

HEDGES: Because like the Jews in Europe at the time of fascism, he had that
intellectual brilliance, which you carry, but also as a black man stood far
enough away from the centers of power, and was certainly by the end of his
life a victim of that power, that he understood how power worked in a way
that the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr I think finally did not.

WEST: Well, James Cone’s laid bare the truth about Reinhold Niebuhr.
There’s
a wonderful play by the great Amira Baraka, the last play that he wrote I
just saw just a few weeks ago, The Most Dangerous Man in America, is about
Du Bois’s trial, February 1951, when he comes in in handcuffs at the age of
83 years old. Hardly anybody would touch him. NAACP has already kicked them
out. Why? Because he says, I’m not going to capitulate to the Cold War and
become just a domestic liberal; I am a freedom fighter with connections to
various freedom movements in Africa and other parts of the world.

HEDGES: Well, and we should be clear, and I can’t remember whether it’s
from
this book or not, but the NAACP was set up as a counterweight to more
radical elements, and in particular the Communist Party.

WEST: After World War II, Gerald Horne and Robin Kelly and the other fine
truth telling historians lay it out. And when Paul Robison attends the 31
Grace court in Brooklyn Heights in Brooklyn, the best borough in the world,
it’s just the two of them, Paul Robison under house arrest. The most
popular
Negro in the world in 1939, he’s under house arrest. Du Bois basically
under
house arrest, passport taken. They’re in dialog. There’s John Killens.
There’s Harry Belafonte coming in every once in a while. That’s the Du
Bois,
that is the Paul Robison that our young folk in Ferguson, young folk in
Baltimore, they need to be attune to the vision and courage, because we are
catching up with them. The American empire is in deep trouble.

HEDGES: Can I read this passage from “The Souls of White Folks”, from your
book, by Du Bois.

WEST: Sure. Yeah. It’s Du Bois’s language. But yes.

HEDGES: It’s Du Bois. It’s Du Bois.

WEST: That’s right. The great Du Bois.

HEDGES: “It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on
herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral
protagonist
in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this rôle. For two or
more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human
hatred,–making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and
making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,–rather a
great religion, a world war-cry. . . .”

Now, Muslims in the Middle East would understand that language.

WEST: Oh, absolutely. And that is the terrorism that brother Willie King’s
singing about with such power.

HEDGES: But it’s a terrorism that Americans are largely–

WEST: In denial about.

HEDGES: In denial, and certainly the corporate media institutions have
blocked from view quite effectively.

WEST: Absolutely. Absolutely. But we’re living at a time in which with this
escalating visibility of police terror and police murder, with hardly any
police going to jail, no serious accountability, and most importantly with
the marvelous new militancy of the young brothers and sisters of all
colors,
but disproportionately chocolate, who have broken the back of fear–you see,
once you break the back of fear and say, I am not afraid any longer, I am
willing to bear witness, put my body on the line, go to jail–and this is
exactly what we’ve seen.

HEDGES: But that killing’s not new. I mean, for decades black people have
been–I mean, American society, maybe because of video that’s been leaked,
you know, they’re shocked.

WEST: That’s right.

HEDGES: But black people have been killed at this rate for decades.

WEST: Absolutely. But when you have a wave of resistance–you see, we just
had the wonderful march at Newark, my dear brother Larry Hamm, People’s
Organization for Progress. We’re going to have a major march here in New
York city October 24, brother Carl Dix and myself. And even my dear brother
Minister Louis Farrakhan, who is controversial, especially among a lot of
progressives who wonder why it is that the minister Louis Farrakhan still
has a presence, but he has a strong presence in terms of keeping track of
the terrorism coming at black folk. He’s going to have a 20th anniversary
of
the Million Man March that’s part of all the different, ideologically
variegated expressions of how do you keep track of white supremacy and its
ugly effects, you see. That’s escalating.

And that’s a beautiful thing, because the system now is just decrepit. You
know, the two-party system is as weak as it can be. You’ve got escalating
ecological catastrophe. You’ve got increasing nuclear catastrophe. You’ve
got the economic catastrophe in terms of the wealth inequality that brother
Bernie Sanders and others talk about. You’ve got the moral catastrophe of–.

HEDGES: He won’t talk about empire, though.

WEST: Now, we’ve got to put some pressure on brother Bernie in that regard.
And I think that–.

HEDGES: And he won’t talk about the Palestinians, and he won’t take on the
military.

WEST: I think he’s more and more open to a critique of the Israeli
occupation. I think he at the same time has to somehow walk a tightrope
between the liberals who are excited about him. But thank God he’s talking
about Wall Street domination.

HEDGES: He’s raising real issues. Yes, he is.

So I want to close this segment. We’re going to talk in the next segment
about what’s happened to the black prophetic tradition. But you have a
quote
in the book where you write about Ella Baker as saying that political
change
is not primarily politically motivated. And I think one of the strengths of
the black prophetic tradition is that it–especially because it has
confronted these frightening monolithic forces–white supremacy, lethal
violence, terror itself, discrimination in all of its forms, institutional,
economic–it sustains itself finally through an element of faith. And I
wonder if you could address that.

WEST: Yeah. I think that when you talk about loving poor people, loving
black people, loving gay brothers, lesbian sisters, and loving Palestinians
vis-à-vis Israeli occupation, or loving Jewish brothers and sisters
vis-à-vis a Hitler, that that’s not just a political resistance. That’s a
deep moral and spiritual form that highlights power and the operations of
power. And there’s no way you can sustain your movements over time based
solely on political calculation or motivation. Something deeper–compassion,
empathy. And for my tradition, the black tradition, because music has been
the privileged form of expression, there’s a sonic dimension to it, you
see,
so that the Donny Hathaways and the Marvin Gayes and the Nina Simones and
the John Coltranes and Max Roaches, they are as much love warriors and
freedom fighters as was Malcolm X, as was Martin Luther King, as was Ella
Baker.

HEDGES: Which is–and Baldwin, when he writes about Malcolm, he writes about
how gentle Malcolm was.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And he was one of the gentlest people he’d ever met.

WEST: Absolutely.

HEDGES: And I think they gets to the core of it, because when you love
those
people, you cannot betray them.

WEST: You can’t betray them.

HEDGES: And if you can’t betray them, it doesn’t matter what they throw at
you. And that is the power of, I think, your work and is the power of that
prophetic tradition.

WEST: Which is the power of the tradition I’m just a small part of. But I’m
going to go down fighting defending that tradition, even given the folk who
try to lie about it.

HEDGES: Thank God you’re here. Thank you very much.

WEST: Yeah. Well, I’m blessed, I’m blessed, my brother.

HEDGES: So stay tuned. We’re going to come back next week and talk to Dr.
West about what’s happened to the black prophetic tradition, the assault
that has been carried out to essentially shut down its voice, and why he is
one of the v




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