Harvard's Rapper: Cornel West Hits Bottom

There are only 17 University Professors among the 2,000-plus faculty members at Harvard, the greatest and richest university in the most powerful nation the world has ever known. They are the elite of the elites, and were awarded the extremely rare University Professor distinction in recognition of their talent and influence.

It's easy to see why these scholars rate. Economist Robert C. Merton won the Nobel Prize. Literary critic Helen Vendler and Chinese-literature scholar Stephen Owen established themselves as among the leading experts in their highly demanding fields. Political scientist Samuel Huntington has written, among other volumes, The Clash of Civilizations and the New World Order, a book given new life after September 11. This is what you expect from America's most brilliant intellects.

You do not expect what Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor Cornel West did last fall. West, acclaimed by many as America's leading black intellectual — and who once complained that "academicist forms of expression have a monopoly on intellectual life" — in November released "Sketches of My Culture" (Artemis), a rap CD.

The disc got West in trouble with the new Harvard president, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who made the mistake of asking the professor what the hell he was thinking when he agreed to that project, among others (heading racist demagogue Al Sharpton's presidential-advisory committee, for instance). In high dudgeon, West threatened to leave for Princeton and take the leading lights of the Afro-American Studies Department with him. Jesse Jackson swooped in to mediate, with Sharpton close on his heels.

It seems to have worked. On Friday, the New York Times reported that the rift had been smoothed over. Few details were given, but Summers appears to have assuaged the black professors without having to issue a public apology to West. After listening to "Sketches of My Culture," however, you might wonder how Summers can keep a disgraceful boob like Cornel West on his faculty without apologizing to all the parents who pay Harvard's $34,500 tuition.

From the disc's opening lines, you know you're in the presence of something unusually bad, but it takes a minute or two for the full scope of its Shatnerian shlockiness to make itself known. If you're like me, then by track four, sticky gobbets of schadenfreude will be coming out your nose and dribbling down your chin. And you're only halfway done!

In case you had any doubts that "Sketches of My Culture" was a vanity project, the first sentence on the disc's promotional website clarifies matters: "In all modesty, this project constitutes a watershed moment in musical history." We are subsequently informed that West and his musical collaborator, Derek "D.O.A." Allen, are "geniuses."

Lyrically, the disc is a plonkingly simple mish-mash of black nationalism, moral posturing, victimization politics, and sentimental uplift. As such, it's a useful guide to West's philosophy — shorn of the impenetrable postmodernist cant that permeates his writing. West deploys his vocabulary much as a 13-year-old girl deploys Kleenex in her training bra: to obscure the embarrassing fact that there's not much there.

The first cut, "The Journey," serves as a thematic overture. "Let the word go forth here and now that the struggle for freedom is still alive and the story of that struggle is still being told," the preacherly West bellows, like Moses from the mountaintop. "We begin with guttural cries and wrenching moans and visceral groans and weary lament and silent ears."

With that line, West might have been foretelling the state of his listeners by the end of the disc, but he's really talking about slavery. It should be noted that as mockable as West's orations are, the things he attempts to discuss are not. It's just that West's sensibility is so thoroughly kitschy (and West himself so thoroughly unaware of the fact) that he trivializes everything he touches. What kind of music do we hear in the background when he alludes to Mother Africa? A "Hakuna Matata" knockoff from The Lion King.

West tells us that black music "soo-thez our bruises," but the second cut, "Stolen King," wallows in black victimization. In the annihilating 1995 review essay in which he declared West's books "worthless," Leon Wielseltier called the professor "a hero in a culture of morbidity, in which wounds are jewels." Perhaps West is merely in love with the sound of his own voice, but there's something bizarrely masochistic about the relish with which he recites lines like: "From the heights of rich African humanity, to the depth of sick American barbarity, in the whirlwinds of white supremacy, black people preserved their sanity and dignity." And: "No other people in the modern world have had such unprecedented levels of unregulated violence against them." This — after Auschwitz, after Cambodia, after Rwanda.

Imagine these sentiments set to music that might have been used to promote the ghetto libation "Thunderbird," and you grasp how cringe-worthy this album is.

The dull, karaoke-machine groove continues on "Elevate Your View," in which a guest rapper named Waynee Wayne joins "Brother West" in preaching reform to a gang-banger. Don't despair, counsels Brother West, stay on the "caravan of struggle," the "train of justice," the "ship of freedom." Carrying on aboard this rickshaw of malarkey, we roll "3Ms," a pro-forma tribute to Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., to whom he refers as a "grand titan of love, drum major for justice." Block those metaphors! Says West, to the three dead worthies: "They and us will never forget you." No, I'm sure us won't.

It's hard to find the bottom in this pit of pathos. It might be West's description of the 1970s as a decade of "deep sharing and caring and loving and hugging." Or you might say it's his final benediction to listeners, in which he exhorts them to carry on the grand march through history, and "Never let us forget Earth, Wind, and Fire encouraging us to keep our heads to the sky."

Though personally, I reached it in "N-Word," West's protest against blacks using the word "nigger." The song is presented as a radio call-in show, in which West telephones to show two previous callers the error of their ways. One of them, a sexy-voiced woman, phones to say, "I love the word 'nigger,' but I only use it in my lovemaking. When I call my man 'nigger,' he works hard."

It is to this cri de coeur that the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., University Professor, Cornel West, hearkens his intellect. Harvard must be so proud.

Officially, they have to be. Its president having caved, Harvard is stuck with this clownish minstrel — and his whopping six-figure salary — and now has to work harder to pretend that a department with such a buffoon as its star is something to be taken seriously. Now the Latino Studies Department, having seen Cornel West, Jesse Jackson, and their gang turn the famously ferocious Larry Summers into the Ivy League equivalent of a prison bride, has begun agitating for special treatment. The only discernible good news for people who despair over the trashing of academic standards in the face of minority mau-mauing is that Tom Wolfe, who is working on a novel about academia, suddenly has a wealth of fresh material.

Here's a detailed and critical review of West's work (to call it "work" gives it far more dignity than it deserves) from 1995 by Leon Wieseltier.

The New Republic
March 6, 1995
All and Nothing at All
By Leon Wieseltier

THE UNREAL WORLD OF CORNEL WEST.
All and Nothing at All
By Leon Wieseltier

Keeping Faith:
Philosophy and Race in America
(Routledge, 319 pp., $19, $16.95 paper)

Race Matters
(Beacon Press, 105 pp., $15)

Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism.
Volume One: Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times
(Common Cause Press, 205 pp., $14.95 paper)

Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism.
Volume Two: Prophetic Reflections:
Notes on Race and Power in America
(Common Cause Press, 244 pp., $14.95 paper)

Prophetic Fragments
(William Eerdmans Publishing Co.,
294 pp., $14.99 paper)

The American Evasion of Philosophy:
A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(University of Wisconsin Press,
279 pp., $16.95 paper)

The Ethical Dimension of Marxist Thought
(Monthly Review Press,
183 pp., $36, $18 paper)

Where are the public intellectuals? The question is asked everywhere in America, but it is not merely an American question. It has been a long time, after all, since calm was preferred to crisis as the proper mood of the mind. For the Marxist tradition in particular, crisis is all there is, and calm is only crisis denied. Modern intellectuals roil to be real. Why think, if nothing is breaking up and nothing is breaking down, if intellectuals (or "cultural workers," as Cornel West likes to call them) cannot become public intellectuals? And then history obliges, and the crisis comes, and the comedy of the public intellectual begins. It is not in the absence of crisis that he cannot think. It is in the presence of crisis that he cannot think. Things start breaking up and things start breaking down, and the public intellectual cannot exceed his conventions and his vocabularies and his projects. The public intellectual begins to seem like nothing more than a person who is smart in public.

Or so is the case of Cornel West. Since there is no crisis in America more urgent than the crisis of race, and since there is no intellectual in America more celebrated for his consideration of the crisis of race, I turned to West, and read his books. They are almost completely worthless. The man who wrote them is a good man, an enemy of enmity; but he is, as he writes again and again, for "a better world." Who is not? And who, at this late date in the history of the attempt to better the world generally, and to better the world of what West calls "America's chocolate cities" specifically, can still use this expression without irony, or without an anxiety about the degradation of idealism?

West's work is noisy, tedious, slippery (in The American Evasion of Philosophy, "evasion" is a term of praise, a description of an accomplishment), sectarian, humorless, pedantic and self-endeared. His judgment of ideas is eccentric. He observes that "black America has yet to produce a great literate intellectual with the exception of Toni Morrison"; that "Marx and Emerson herald self-realization and promote democracy"; that Trilling had a "relaxed prose" and "a famous conversational style"; that "Marxist thought becomes even more relevant after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe than it was before"; that "World War ii was a major setback for anti-imperialist struggles in black America"; that "intersubjectivity is the go-cart of individuality"; that "Malcolm x moved toward a more Marxist-informed humanist position just prior to his assassination"; that "crack is the postmodern drug"; that "the classical Marxist critique of religion is not an a priori rejection of religion"; and so on.

West's eccentricity is surpassed by West's vanity. In a survey of "contemporary Afro-American social thought," he concludes that "my attempt to put flexible Marxist analysis on the agenda of the black churches is a pioneering endeavor." The twelfth verse of the sixth chapter of the gospel of John ("He said unto his disciples, gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost") puts him in mind of his own essays and book reviews, and he assembles them in a book called Prophetic Fragments. He likes to compare himself to the prophets: "I am a prophetic Christian freedom fighter," he writes, from his station at a "ruling class institution like Princeton," and his collections of interviews and occasional pieces are called Prophetic Reflections and Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times. "Like both Russian novelists and blues singers," he allows, "I stress the concrete lived experience of despair and tragedy." And "the brief yet gallant struggle to make Oklahoma an all-black (and red) state" was a failed quest that produced ... the legendary "free mind" of black Oklahomans associated with black towns like Muskogee, Boley, and Langston, and with such black natives as Ralph Ellison, John Hope Franklin, Charlie Christian, the Gap Band, and, I humbly add, myself. He applauds his origins for imbuing him with "ego-deflating humility." His parents and his siblings write the introductions to his works. He appears on the cover of a book in a three-piece suit and in its third chapter he proclaims that "the Victorian three-piece suit--with a clock and chain in the vest--worn by W.E.B. Du Bois ... dignified his sense of intellectual vocation, a sense of rendering service by means of critical intelligence," unlike "the shabby clothing worn by most black intellectuals these days," which "symbolize[s] their utter marginality behind the walls of academe."

And yet the brother is no stranger to ivy, at least mentally. "I am continually caught in a kind of `heteroglossia,'" he confesses, speaking a number of English languages in radically different contexts. When it comes to abstract, theoretical reflection, I employ Marx, Weber, Frankfurt theorists, Foucault, and so on. When it comes to speaking with the black masses, I use Christian narratives and stories, a language meaningful to them but filtered through and informed by intellectual developments from de Tocqueville to Derrida. When it comes to the academy itself there is yet another kind of language, abstract but often atheoretical, since social theorizing is mostly shunned; philosophers are simply ill-equipped to talk about social theory: they know Wittgenstein but not Weber, they know J.L. Austin but not Marx. West's books are monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory. He complains that "academicist forms of expression have a monopoly on intellectual life," that black scholars "imitate the dominant paradigms elevated by fashionable Northeastern seaboard institutions of higher learning," but he is himself such an imitator, and he is almost wholly undone by his own academicism.

West's most recent book, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America, is a perfect document of the thrill of turgidity that characterizes the humanities of the day. It is a lifeless book, and it abounds in sentences such as this one:

Following the model of the black diasporan traditions of music, athletics, and rhetoric, black cultural workers must constitute and sustain discursive and institutional networks that deconstruct earlier modern black strategies for identity-formation, demystify power relations that incorporate class, patriarchal, and homophobic biases, and construct more multivalent and multidimensional responses that articulate the complexity and diversity of black practices in the modern and postmodern world. Or this one:

My view neither promotes a post-Marxian idealism (for it locates acceptable genealogical accounts in material social practices), nor supports an explanatory nihilism (in that it posits some contingent yet weighted set of social practices as decisive factors to explain a given genealogical configuration, that is, set of events). More pointedly, my position appropriates the implicit pragmatism of Nietzsche for the purposes of a deeper, and less dogmatic, historical materialist analysis. Such a marriage of populism and esotericism is a common characteristic of the academic left. West's sentences are not altogether meaningless. But their meanings are not for you, even if they will eventually set you free. The aim of West's deeper and less dogmatic historical materialist analysis, of course, is action. You remember. Philosophers have for too long thought about the world. The time has come to change it. But with words such as these? The obscurity of this language is not what offends. What offends is the confidence that the established order will eventually fall before this language. Scholasticism is a noble calling, but it leaves the world as it found it. There is not a drug dealer in America who will give himself up to Deleuze and Guattari.

If crisis requires anything, it is clarity; but West's conception of the intellectual vocation is too complicated for clarity. The black intellectual, according to West, must resist "the Booker T. Temptation," which is a "preoccupation with the mainstream and legitimizing power," and "the Talented Tenth Seduction," which is "a move toward arrogant group insularity," and the "Go It Alone Option," which is a "rejectionist perspective that shuns the mainstream and group solidarity." The black intellectual must become a "Critical Organic Catalyst." "By this I mean a person who stays attuned to the best of what the mainstream has to offer--its paradigms, viewpoints, and methods--yet maintains a grounding in affirming and enabling subcultures of criticism." Sounds fine; and Martin Luther King Jr. was, in West's account, the realization of the Gramscian fantasy.

The problem is that the union of theory and practice, in West's hands, becomes a union of pomposity and enthusiasm, a long saga of positioning. And so we get affirmations such as this one: "Rorty's historicist turn was like music to my ears --nearly as sweet as the Dramatics, The Spinners, and The Main Ingredient, whom I then listened to daily for sanity." West skips undialectically from the seminar to the street, celebrating his connectedness. This has ridiculous results. "Although the Christian quest for transcendent meaning in life and history is rejected in Prince's lyrics," he declares, "the idea of divine intervention in the form of eschatological catastrophic presence is observed"; and it does not escape his notice that "the agapic praxis of communities" was abandoned in the late work of Marvin Gaye, and that a change in the image of the Temptations "could not give Motown hegemonic status on fast funk."

Tracing the evolution of jazz from Charlie Parker to Grover Washington, West has not a word to say about decline; and he insists that there is an essential relationship between jazz and democracy, concluding Race Matters with a tribute to "the jazz freedom fighter." I use the term "jazz" here not so much as a term for a musical art form, as for a mode of being in the world, an improvisational mode of protean, fluid, and flexible dispositions toward reality suspicious of "either/or" viewpoints....

It is true that the materials of jazz were not discovered at the court of the Esterhazys; but the rest is sentimentality. Improvisation in jazz is not a release from structure, and structure in jazz is not an experience of oppression. Jazz is no more democratic than any other art. It is governed, like all art, by an either/or: either you do it well or you don't.

But West is a politicizer. In Keeping Faith, there appears this extraordinary passage:

The repoliticizing of the black working poor and underclass should focus primarily on the black cultural apparatus, especially the ideological form and content of black popular music. African American life is permeated by black popular music. Since black musicians play such an important role in African American life, they have a special mission and responsibility: to present beautiful music which both sustains and motivates black people and provides visions of what black people should aspire to. Despite the richness of the black musical tradition and the vitality of black contemporary music, most black musicians fall far short of this crucial mission and responsibility. There are exceptions--Gil Scott-Heron, Brian Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff--but more political black popular music is needed.... Black activists must make black musicians accountable in some way to the urgent needs and interests of the black community. Agit-pop!

This is not Stalinism. This is silliness. But it is silliness of a particular kind, which brings us to the matter of what West really believes.

II.

I am not a prophet and not the son of a prophet, said the prophet. The professor is not so circumspect. He calls his work prophetic. His point of regard could not be more unprophetic: he is a historicist, and the prophets were the early enemies of historicism, who chastised the temporal in the name of the eternal; but he is not deterred. West's writings are really tiresome on the subject of their own prophetic-ness. Of his view of the world, he writes that

I have dubbed it "prophetic" in that it harks back to the Jewish and Christian tradition of prophets who brought urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day. The mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage--come what may. And: The synoptic vision I accept is a particular kind of prophetic Christian perspective which comprehensively grasps and enables opposition to existential anguish, socio-economic, cultural and political oppression and dogmatic modes of thought and action.

And:

Prophetic criticism ... begins with social structural analyses [but] it also makes explicit its moral and political aims. It is partisan, partial, engaged and crisis-centered, yet always keeps open a skeptical eye to avoid dogmatic traps, premature closures, formulaic formulations or rigid conclusions. It would be hard to exaggerate West's satisfaction with his spiritual temperament.

There is a modern view of prophecy in the Bible according to which it was fundamentally a political vocation, a fierce and founding style of social criticism; and West's propheticism is just another instance of that view.

The moral vision and ethical norms I accept are derived from the prophetic Christian tradition. I follow the biblical injunction to look at the world through the eyes of its victims, and the Christocentric perspective which requires that one see the world through the lens of the Cross--and thereby see our relative victimizing and relative victimization. Since we inhabit different locations on the existential, socioeconomic, cultural and political scales, our victim status differs, though we all, in some way, suffer. Needless to say, the more multilayered the victimization, the more suffering one undergoes. And given the predominant forms of life-denying forces in the world, the majority of humankind experiences thick forms of victimization. There are victims. This is not a matter of controversy. The harshness of the world, and the human responsibility for a large measure of its harshness, cannot be gainsaid. But the Bible did not prescribe that we look at the world through the eyes of its victims. It prescribed that we seek justice. That is not the same thing; but West is dead to the difference. He is a hero in a culture of morbidity, in which wounds are jewels. And his appropriation of what he calls "the Christocentric perspective" for the politics of victimization in America is preposterous. It is banal at best, and it is blasphemous at worst, to describe the crucifixion of Jesus as victimization, in the sense in which we recognize victimization. No road runs from Calvary to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Why is West a Christian? He gives two reasons. The first reason is "on the existential level." The Christian tradition helps him to understand "the crises and traumas of life," to overcome sensations of "deep emptiness and pervasive meaningless." The second reason is "on the political level." It is that "the culture of the wretched of the earth is religious." "To be religious," he writes, permits oneself to devote one's life to accenting the prophetic and progressive potential within those traditions that shape the everyday practices and deeply held perspectives of most oppressed peoples. What a wonderful privilege and vocation this is! Historically, this is bizarre. The story of the alliance of religion with power is a long and miserable story. Religion has animated oppression as much as it has animated the resistance to oppression. What some of West's favorite theologians like to call "liberation" has often taken the form of secularization; and it is not difficult to understand that the threat to one's faith has been preferred to the threat to one's life.

Not that West is unaware of the grisly past. But this is how he treats it:

On the one hand, I assume that religious traditions are, for the most part, reactionary, repressive, and repulsive without heavy doses of modern formulations of rule of law, gender and racial equality, tolerance, and especially substantive democracy. On the other hand, such modern formulations can be based on or derived from the best of religions. This is even more bizarre. It is true that there are elements of tolerance in all the monotheistic faiths, but the elements of intolerance are more numerous; a religion that is based on a revelation is a religion based on an ideal of exclusiveness, which is not an ideal of democracy. And what sort of faith is it that finds religion "repulsive" without a particular politics, and locates "the best of religions" in their approximations to social democracy?

And what if the wretched of the earth were unbelievers? I don't mean to remind anybody of Pilate, but what is truth? "Of course," West murmurs, "the fundamental philosophical question remains whether the Christian gospel is ultimately true." Of course. But West is a postmodern man. His faith is proudly unexercised by the question of truth. For the question has been settled. There is no truth. There are only truths. This has been established, he thinks, by Richard Rorty, and more generally by the repudiation of traditional metaphysics in Anglo-American philosophy.

West writes glowingly of "the historicist turn in the philosophy of religion," which banished from the temple "all modes of philosophical reflection which invoke ahistorical quests for certainty and transhistorical searches for foundations." He describes himself as a "prophetic pragmatist," by which he means a Christian who believes in the gospel according to John Dewey, for whom there are no stable and lasting essences, no self and no world except the self and the world that we create, no invisible reality at the end of visible reality, no expression of the human spirit that refers to anything more than its experience.

There are no arguments in West's discussion of these matters. He is not a philosopher, he is a cobbler of philosophies; and so he reports the pragmatist and historicist tidings and proceeds to the manufacture of what he needs. "To put it bluntly," he concludes, "I do hope that the historicist turn in philosophy of religion enriches the prophetic Christian tradition and enables us to work more diligently for a better world." To put it bluntly, he will be disappointed. The Christian tradition will not be enriched by a faith for which God is not real. Before what, exactly, does the postmodernist bow his head? For the anti-essentialist, what kingdom is at hand? Rorty claims that the abolition of transcendence is necessary for liberalism, but West claims that the abolition of transcendence is necessary for religion. He does not see that his position is a dire contradiction. "Prophetic pragmatism" is not rich and revolutionary, it is indulgent and impossible. He can have the prophets or he can have the pragmatists, he can have truth or he can have truths, but he cannot have both. (It was Pilate who spoke in the voice of the pragmatist.)

West's model of the "prophetic Christian as organic intellectual," again, is Martin Luther King Jr. But the authority to which King appealed was not the authority of "social and heterogeneous narratives which account for the present and project a future"; and when he demanded that justice run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream, he was not calling America to "critique." The moral and political force of King, and the struggle for civil rights from Harper's Ferry to Selma, was owed to the certainty that some things are absolutely true or absolutely false, absolutely good or absolutely evil. King was religious, but West, at least in his writings, is religiose. What summons him to faith in God is not the object of the faith, but its social utility. He resembles, in this regard, many of the conservatives whom he despises.

III.

For the purpose of grasping West's politics, there is no better summary than this paragraph, written less than a decade ago, in an essay called "Critical Theory and Christian Faith." It is long, but it is special.

Industrial capitalism, with its nightwatchman state and its military-like organizations, boasted of its overt racist practices such as its Jim Crowism against people of African descent in the Diaspora and in Africa, its exclusionary immigration laws against Asians, imperial conquest and geographical containment of Mexican and indigenous peoples; it promoted its cult of domesticity to privatize the role and function of heterosexual women and banish the presence of lesbian women; and it valorized the doctrine of masculinity which degraded "effeminate" heterosexual and gay man. Monopoly capitalism, with its interventionist state and bureaucratic administration, tempered its racist practices and refined its racist ideologies against people of color--yet nearly committed genocide against Jewish peoples [sic] in the midst of "civilized" Europe; celebrated omnifunctional women who worked double loads in the public and private spheres; castigated lesbians and recloseted gay men. Multinational corporate capitalism, with its bankrupt and authoritarian-like state and administrative-intensive workforce, turns its principal racist ammunition on the black and brown working poor and underclass; focuses its right-wing (or restorative) movements on women's reproductive rights; and often poses lesbians and gays as mere cultural scapegoats. The recent fanning of the social logics of white, male, and heterosexual supremacist discourses and practices in the Americanization and Sovietization of the world further deform and debilitate public life because these logics attempt to make this sphere the possession of primarily white heterosexual elites--or those who emulate them, from Margaret Thatcher to Clarence Pendleton Jr.

Industrial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, multinational corporate capitalism: these are the categories that West cherishes for the analysis of American life.

West's published work is an endless exercise in misplaced Marxism. Philosophically, his desire is to demonstrate that "Marx's turn toward history resembles the anti-foundationalist argument of the American pragmatists," but no such demonstration is provided, and anyway the resemblance is largely a measure of West's desire. Otherwise he seeks to devise a Marxist ground for American grievances, and in this, alas, he succeeds brilliantly.

There is something puerile about West's Marxism; it is too much fun. He writes like a man who refuses to accept the fact that he was born too late for a particular excitement. Instead he produces little mimicries of the Marxist tradition, such as the essay called "Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism," which promises to furnish the proper theory of modes of European domination and forms of European subjugation and types of European exploitation and repression. The italics, needless to say, are his own. In 1985 he writes, and in 1988 he reprints, this exhortation to black Americans: "The relative unity and strength of our capitalist foes requires that we must come together if our struggle is to win!" The urgency is matched by the unreality. But this is true of all doctrine.

It is hard to read West's description of, say, the Black Panthers as "the leading black lumpenproletarian revolutionary party in the sixties" without recalling Trotsky's oration to the "workers and peasants of the South Bronx." But not all of West's progressivism is quite so charming.

The most crucial brute fact about the American terrain is that the u.s.a. began as a liberal capitalist nation permeated with patriarchal oppression and based, in large part, upon a slave economy.

The basic difference between the Americanization and the Sovietization of the world is that the u.s.a. was born with a precious rhetoric of rights.... This heritage remains a valuable source for the renewal of public life in countries under the influence of the u.s.a. and ussr.

The most significant theme of the new cultural politics of difference is the agency, capacity and ability of human beings who have been culturally degraded, politically oppressed and economically exploited by bourgeois liberal and communist illiberal status quos.

The profound tragedy of the epochal change in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe may be ... a kind of global erasure of egalitarian and democratic concern for jobs, food, shelter, literacy and health care. This would mean that along with the unleashing of capitalist market forces on an international scale goes an unleashing of despair for those caught within or concerned about the world's ill-fed, ill-clad, and ill-housed. None of this awfulness would matter much, except that it informs West's opinions on the subject of race in America, and those opinions are loose in the land. It is impossible to understand the depth of West's contempt for the black middle class, for example, without understanding the depth of his contempt for capitalism. The emergence of a black middle class as a consequence of the civil rights revolution is, for West, a phenomenon without dignity. It signifies, in his view, "the new class divisions produced by black inclusion (and exclusion)." Throughout his writings, the men and the women of the black middle class are described as heartless collaborators with the market, creatures of "conspicuous consumption and hedonistic indulgence," who have abandoned their political responsibility. "Black entree into the culture of consumption," he scolds, "made status an obsession and addiction to stimulation a way of life." And elsewhere, "Like any other petite bourgeoisie, the `new' black middle class will most likely pursue power-seeking, promote black entrepreneurial growth, and perpetuate professional advancement."

In one of his most troubling utterances, West offers this summary of the recent history of African Americans: "The '60s in African American history witnessed an unforgettable appearance of the black masses on the historical stage, but they are quickly dragged off--killed, maimed, strung out, imprisoned or paid off." Paid off! This, from the burgher on the cover of Race Matters, who appears in his finery on a rooftop in East Harlem. West traveled there to be photographed in the neighborhood of those "black masses." He complains that nine taxis refused to take him from Park and 60th to 115th and First. "My blood began to boil," he recalls. A parable of racism. But he suffered the slights of Park and 60th, as he admits a few lines earlier, because "I left my car--a rather elegant one--in a safe parking lot." So the taxis would not take him where he would not take his car! This is not precisely what Gramsci had in mind.

West flatters himself that his Marxism is unorthodox. It is his "basic disagreement with Marxist theory," he says, that "I hold that many social practices, such as racism, are best understood and explained not only or primarily by locating them within modes of production, but also by situating them within the cultural practices of civilizations." Never mind that this unorthodoxy is almost a century old, that it is just another school of Marxism. The truth is that, for all of West's preachments about "nihilism" in the black community, and all his summonings to a "politics of conversion," his analysis of the inner city is mainly an economicist one. West believes that what most ails the inner city is "class inequality," or "the distribution of wealth, and power and income"; and that "visionary progressives must always push for substantive redistributive measures," even if "every redistributive measure is a compromise with and concession from the caretakers of American prosperity." For "without jobs and [economic] incentives to be productive citizens the black poor become even more prone to criminality, drugs and alcoholism." "Even more prone"? There are many, many black poor who are not prone at all; and the resistance of these people to the forces of social and spiritual disintegration surely gives the lie to the economic analysis of morality, according to which values are an expression of class, and the values of the bourgeoisie are the consequence of the money of the bourgeoisie. (It is hard not to conclude, as one watches illegitimacy acquiring legitimacy in American society, that a little bourgeois morality would go a long way.) It flies in the face, moreover, of the determinism that reduces the lives of the miserable to their misery. They're depraved on account of they're deprived: this determinism often masquerades as a form of hope, but it is a form of despair.

West is a dodger on the question of individual responsibility. He resents the "new black conservatives" for making an issue of it. "We indeed must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people, but we must do so cognizant of the circumstances into which people are born and under which they live. By overlooking these circumstances, the new black conservatives fall into the trap of blaming black poor people for their predicament." This is not a fair account of the views of Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, Stanley Crouch and others. I do not hear them blaming people for being poor. I hear them blaming people for abandoning families. Their assumption is that the latter is not the result of the former; that men are good husbands and good fathers whether or not there is cash in the bank. And this is finally a philosophical assumption. The discussion of individual responsibility is really a discussion of human agency. There is no way to explain the behavior of good husbands and good fathers, except that they have chosen to be good husbands and good fathers. In their blasted universe, they have exercised the freedom of their will.

And yet the "prophetic Christian freedom fighter" fights those who insist upon the explanation from freedom. West has it backward: we must be cognizant of the circumstances into which black people are born and under which they live, but we must criticize and condemn immoral acts of black people. There is no government agency that can let human agency off the hook. But West, as I say, is a dodger. "It is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims- perspective." Politically, this is plausible. (Pennsylvania Avenue has run between between Scylla and Charybdis for two years now.) Philosophically, this is implausible. Fortune treats us all differently, but moral behavior is not a hostage to bad fortune, even if bad fortune makes immoral behavior sometimes more attractive. We are not all in the same universe socially and economically, but we are all in the same universe morally. Either we are accountable for our actions, or we are not. Either, or.

West's tirelessly preaches reconciliation, between blacks and blacks, between blacks and whites, between blacks and Jews; but intellectual reconciliation is not the same thing as emotional reconciliation, and emotional reconciliation is not the same thing as political reconciliation. His sweetness lands West in all kinds of confusions. Last year he endorsed Al Sharpton's candidacy for the Senate in New York, "his role in the controversial Tawana Brawley case" notwithstanding, because he "could fuse the best of Malcolm x and Martin Luther King Jr." Sharpton, he told the readers of The Daily News, was "in process," and Farrakhan, too, was "in process," though Farrakhan "still has far to go to embrace a progressive stance."

Nothing of his own is alien to him. He finds human truths in inhuman lies. In a lecture on "The Black Underclass and Black Philosophers," West suggests that the black community has been transformed by drugs, he says, "whether it's conspiratorial or not." And elsewhere he describes the history of the inner city since the 1960s in this way:

The repressive state apparatus in American capitalist society jumped at the opportunity to express its contempt for black people. And the basic mechanism of pacifying the erupting black ghettoes--the drug industry--fundamentally changed the character of the black community. The drug industry, aided and abetted by underground capitalists, invaded black communities with intense force, police indifference and political silence. It accelerated black, white- collar and blue-collar working-class suburban flight, and transformed black poor neighborhoods into terrains of human bondage to the commodity form.

The unreality of the theory of the academy meets the unreality of the theory of the street. It is a high price to pay for the tickle of authenticity.

Enough. Cornel West has been called "the preeminent African American intellectual of his generation." This cannot be so. He is a homiletical figure, a socialist divine, who has come to lift the spirits of the progressives. He is forever imploring them, the "progressives of all colors," to come together. But if the progressives of America finally come together, all that will have happened is that the progressives of America will have finally come together. It is obvious only to them that the greatest failure of American society since slavery will stop for them. Terrains of human bondage to the commodity form! From such notions, the nasty world has nothing to fear. Something is happening in our midst that none of us appears to understand. Perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Where are the private intellectuals? Philosophers have for too long tried to change the world. The time has come to think about it. http://magazines.enews.com/magazines/tnr/archive/1995/03/030695.6.html

Matt Labash, senior writer

C-Dub Is Not in the Hizz-ouse
With neither gats in holsters nor girls on shoulders, Cornel West makes a rap album.

by Matt Labash
11/23/2001 12:01:00 AM

MAKING HIP-HOP records is a bit like making love: Anyone can do it, but it takes a special knack to do it right. Consequently, history is replete with those who have scribbled rhymes on a napkin, booked studio time, then barreled headlong off the high-dive only to do an artistic belly-flop.

Recall "The Super Bowl Shuffle," performed by the 1985 Chicago Bears, whose linebacker Mike Singletary proved that black men can be as rhythmically retarded as their white counterparts. Then there was the unfortunate "Wham! Rap," in which George Michael, still in his leg-warmers/silk-gym-shorts phase, attempted to boost his street cred by rapping "Give a wham / Give a bam / But don't give a damn." But the "Ishtar" of rap disasters came from Warren Beatty, who in 1998, delivered "Bulworth." It is hard to see how anyone, even under the influence of powerful hallucinogens, could think that a political satire in which a United States senator takes to campaigning in rhyme would be a swell idea. Indeed, watching the title character, played by Beatty, rap about universal health care ("You can call it single payer or Canadian way / Only socialized medicine will ever save the day") accounts for the single most uncomfortable moment I've ever witnessed in a film.

To be an embarrassing rap-dabbler, it helps to be self-infatuated, tone-deaf (both figuratively and literally), and to have absolutely no sense of one's own ridiculousness. So it comes as little surprise that Harvard professor Cornel West has teed up with what is being billed as his first rap album, "Sketches of My Culture."

To best understand what kind of rapper West is, it is helpful to understand the kind he is not. West evidences none of the sexual braggadocio of the late Eazy-E, who fellow Niggaz With Attitude enthusiasts will remember was a "brother who will smother your mother / And tell your sister that I love her." Nor, mercifully, does he employ terminology like "H-to-the-izzo, V-to-the-izza"--that nonsensical brand of rap Esperanto favored by Jay-Z and others for whom English is no longer adequate.

Amazon.com's house review promises that on this album, "the ivory tower gets jiggy wit it." But West's style actually recalls the '70s era spoken-word artistry of Gil Scott-Heron, who performed songs like "Home is Where the Hatred Is" over lots of congas and funky flute solos, ensuring that his music would age about as well as fondue pots and macrame hangers. Not that West was averse to impersonating more conventional MC's. When he entered the studio, he told the New Yorker, "They only wanted me to speak. But when I got in there, I got involved in the rapping direction. It just came forth." But Clifton West, his brother and executive producer, added, "We had to stop you from rapping. We were busting up."

This hasn't discouraged West from reaching out to a new audience, the one that may have missed his 20 or so books, despite enchanting titles like "The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought." West has signed a three-record deal with Artemis, making him label-mates with Baja Men, popularizers of the booty anthem, "Who Let the Dogs Out?"

Ever the intellectual name-dropper, West has said his prose-poetry lies somewhere between "Eliot and Swinburne." Lest one think one is in for rhymes being busted about objective correlatives or mid-Victorian poetic revolts, West further confounds by saying he is "taking it back to Chekhov and Tennessee Williams. It's intellectual without being cerebral." Likewise, it is audible, without being listenable.

With inflections of blues, jazz, gospel shouts, and just about anything else you can name, the actual music can be summed up thusly: The mellower tracks sound like the midnight-love-me-down-faux-soul-syrup that passes for R&B on urban radio these days. The up-tempo stuff has the sort of straining-for-authenticity vibe of a Schlitz malt liquor ad. Both varieties are tinny and synthetic, as if they were mixed on a Casio keyboard.

But the music is an afterthought--white noise behind West's Baptist preacher/Black nationalist delivery. His lyrical flow, even with the added punch of somebody named Waynee Wayne, could use some help, as it sounds like he's reading his old lectures, which are lathered and slathered in the kind of academese and hot-buttered hokum that might impress undergrads into the sack, but that aren't of much use otherwise.

A constant in West's rapping, as it is in his writing, is his tendency to call roll, swaddling himself in other's achievements and legacies, hoping that by merely mentioning their talents, someone will mistake them for his own. On "Sketches of My Culture," West invokes the names of Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Marvin Gaye, Luther Vandross, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Marcus Garvey--and that's all by the third track. The fourth song, "3M's," is not, as I was hoping in the interest of variety, an ode to the manufacturer of Post-It notes and Scotch tape. Rather it was for "Brother Martin, Brother Medgar, and Brother Malcolm" (X, not Muggeridge).

More cloying, even, than West's forefathers attendance chart, is his warming over turgid academese and passing it off as "barefoot funk." "Reflections," an interlude provided by his guest-rapping nephew, resembles no such thing as barefoot funk. Or even open-toed funk, for that matter. Imagine DMX trying to belt out the following word scramble: "Time gets interwoven to refrig and / or oven with variance coming after centuries of scientific observation. Heliocentric puts specific comprehension to circular flow with mass bind of mind velocity." To which the Baja Men might say, "Who let this dog out?"

On "Sketches," there are all sorts of gut-busting moments. It's hard to pick a favorite. Maybe it comes during "Frontline," when West tries to get some lyrical bang out of a George Soros-inspired factoid that's kind of hard to dance to: "Criminal Justice system that oversees black people being convicted, 70 percent of the drug sentences but commit only 12 percent of the drug crimes." Maybe it's during "3M's," when he inadvertently makes Martin Luther King sound like he's riding the lead float in a Gay Pride parade: "Brother Martin . . . grand titan of love, drum major for justice." (Drum major for justice?)

Maybe it's the earnest self-consciousness of what the Village Voice called "eat-your-black-eyed-peas" hip hop. This is best exemplified by the song "N-word," which calls for a moratorium on the N-word--a moratorium that West himself failed to observe last month when suggesting to an audience at Harvard's Kennedy School that "America has been niggerized by the terrorist attack." It was a comment that generally escaped notice, perhaps because no one had a clue what the hell he was talking about.

Such are the hazards of trying to follow Cornel West's career. As the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier once put it after bravely soldiering through most of West's oeuvre, West's books are "monuments to the devastation of a mind by the squalls of theory." What else can you say of a man who once wrote: "Following the model of the black diasporan traditions of music, athletics, and rhetoric, black cultural workers must constitute and sustain discursive and institutional networks that deconstruct earlier modern black strategies for identity-formation, demystify power relations that incorporate class, patriarchal and homophobic biases, and construct more multivalent and multidimensional responses that articulate the complexity and diversity of black practices in the modern and postmodern world."

Perhaps the best we can hope for is that West is distracted from ever again composing such paragraphs in his reincarnation as a rapper and co-overseer of a Hip Hop think tank at Columbia University (possible white paper title: "Whither Ice Cube?"). There are, after all, plenty of good things to say about "Sketches": It's only nine tracks long. It might become the new party soundtrack for smirking thirtysomethings who are tired of shocking their friends with William Shatner's cover of "Tambourine Man." And finally, while one was never sure when listening to Gil Scott-Heron classics like "Whitey on the Moon" whether we should be laughing with him or at him, the ever self-serious West has eliminated any guesswork.

Matt Labash is senior writer at The Weekly Standard.

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