Philosopher With a Mission: CORNEL WEST

With his full-blown Afro, close-fitting three-piece suits and fondness for rap music, Cornel West comes across as too hip to be a philosopher. That helps explain why people are always confusing him with someone considerably less highbrow, especially when he’s not on campus:

— Driving through upstate New York to lecture at a New England college a few years ago, West was pulled over by a cop who figured him for a drug runner because of his flashy clothes, jewelry and sporty Camaro. When West protested that he was in fact a professor of religion, the officer scoffed, “Yeah, and I’m the flying nun. Let’s go, nigger,” and hauled him off to jail. It took a phone call to the college to secure West’s release.

— As a teaching fellow at Harvard, West was preparing to give a talk on the Greek tragedy Antigone when one of the students, mistaking West for a janitor, asked him to bring in more chairs. West complied, but when the rest of the class arrived he marched to the lectern. He delivered an impassioned discourse on Antigone’s love song “about human beings being so noble on one hand and so cruel on the other.”

— After watching West coax amen after amen from the hard-to-please congregation of the Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, California, with a fiery sermon, many people are convinced he’s an ordained minister. Observed theologian William Sloane Coffin, who witnessed it: “That was black preaching at its best.” The truth, says West, is that although he accepted Christ as his personal Saviour when he was 14, “I’ve just never felt the call to preach. I don’t proselytize for anybody, including Jesus.”

As these incidents suggest, Cornel West is one complex dude: brilliant scholar, political activist, committed Christian and soul brother down to the bone. At 40 he has become one of the most insightful and passionate analysts of America’s racial dilemma to emerge in recent years, the architect of a post-civil rights philosophy of black liberation that is beginning to be heard across the country. “I think he is one of our most important critical thinkers,” says James H. Cone, West’s former colleague at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. “He has almost singlehandedly helped us see the importance of economic and class issues within the black community and the larger society.” Henry Louis Gates Jr., head of Harvard’s black-studies program, calls West “the pre-eminent African-American intellectual of our time.”

West is a study in the dialectics of personality: an author of acclaimed books on American pragmatism, prophetic Christianity and the ethical dimensions of Marxism who also possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the latest releases from Arrested Development and Janet Jackson. He turned down a coveted post at Harvard in part because Boston radio stations don’t play enough black music, which he calls “an important restorative of my soul.” He was kicked out of elementary school in Sacramento, California, for slugging a teacher who asked him to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, which West refused to do as a protest against segregation. But he went on to graduate magna cum laude from Harvard in only three years, while simultaneously working two jobs and earning a reputation as one of the most bodacious dancers ever to do the funky chicken on an Ivy League campus. Says his brother Clifton: “Cornel has always liked to go to two or three parties every weekend, but only after reading two or three books. He’s been like that since he was a kid.”

As director of Afro-American studies at Princeton since 1988, West has nurtured what even its rivals concede is the best program of its kind in the nation. Significantly, the university, where West got his doctorate, is within broadcast range of New York City’s WBLS-FM, West’s favorite soul-music station. The department includes Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist Toni Morrison and biographer Arnold Rampersad.

Now this academic star with a firsthand knowledge of the tribulations of being black in America is on the brink of wider fame. He has become a high- profile guest on TV talk shows and a controversial contributor to op-ed pages and magazines, with bristling articles on black anti-Semitism, gay rights and the social virtues of rap. His new book, Race Matters, has shown up on some best-seller lists on the strength of an 18-city promotion tour.

Timed to appear on the first anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters is the first of West’s eight books (including Breaking Bread, Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, co-authored by the black feminist writer bell hooks) intended for a general audience. Though far from his most profound writing, the slender collection of essays is laden with provocative observations on a broad range of racially loaded topics that have delighted and irritated people on both sides of the color line. West flays liberals and conservatives for trying to force blacks “to do all the ‘cultural’ and ‘moral’ work necessary for healthy race relations” while ignoring the psychic pain that racism has inflicted on the urban poor. He accuses the black middle class that has sprung up since the civil rights movement of the ’60s of being “decadent” and “deficient.” One consequence of its grasping materialism, he charges, is that “there has not been a time in the history of black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low.” West also ventures into psychosexual waters, writing that “it is virtually impossible to talk candidly about race without talking about sex.” He contends that “Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality,” adding that “black sexuality is a taboo subject in America principally because it is a form of black power over which whites have no control.”

West’s interests range far beyond the epistemological conundrums that preoccupy many professional philosophers. Nor is he easy to typecast as a liberal or conservative, black nationalist or integrationist, since he endorses bits and pieces of all those ideas. Instead, this self-styled “intellectual freedom fighter” wields his learning as a polemical sword, slashing at barriers that prevent “ordinary people from living lives of dignity.” Says West: “We need intellectual weaponry to find out why people, black and white, are catching the hell they’re catching in America and around the world. If we don’t have it, and historical windows open up to make social change, we’ll find ourselves unprepared.” His goal is to become an “organic intellectual” on the order of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the father of transcendentalism, “someone who tries to fuse the life of the mind with the public affairs of the nation, who tries to shape public opinion.”

West’s vision, which he calls prophetic pragmatism, is most fully spelled out in The American Evasion of Philosophy. The book traces how Emerson’s emphasis on innovation, refined by John Dewey and other American thinkers, then leavened with a dose of Marxist class analysis and the black church’s commitment to racial justice, can be the basis for a rebirth of democratic radicalism. Says West: “I’m trying to revive a grand yet flawed tradition, to take the best from liberalism, populism and the Gospel while keeping track of what happens to everyday people, the ones the Bible calls the least of these.”

In practice, that makes West a Marxist who believes in God, an admirer of black nationalism who thinks such Afrocentrics as Leonard Jeffries are too narrowly parochial. He pulls the disparate threads together like jazz: “Emerson said it’s all about experimentalism, and Louis Armstrong’s music is all about improvisation. I think we need these kinds of links, to be eclectic, to open us up to what we actually share rather than what divides us.”

Like many black activists and socialists, West rails against white racism, powerful corporations and rampant consumerism. But because of his passion for moral consistency, he also insists the fight against sexism and homophobia must be on an equal footing with the battle against racial oppression. “A lot of black brothers and sisters think talking about homophobia and sexism will dilute the attack on racism,” says West. “But black culture is unimaginable without James Baldwin, the poet Audre Lorde or ((civil rights activist)) Bayard Rustin, and I won’t even begin to talk about black gay brothers and sisters and the role they play in the music of the black church.” As for sexism, says West, “for too long, black brothers have been beating up black sisters just like white policemen beat up Rodney King. We’ve got to clean up the moral content of the black freedom struggle.”

% West’s budding fame presents him with new challenges. The biggest is to avoid being swept up in a destructive swirl of publicity as many earlier black intellectuals and leaders have been. Starting with Booker T. Washington, America has seemed to have room for only one top black spokesman at a time, consigning each former favorite to the ash heap of inauthenticity as soon as a new H.N.I.C. (Head Negro in Charge) appeared.

With West, this process of celebrity making is shifting into high gear. The message on West’s answering machine at Princeton refers those interested in arranging a speaking engagement to a high-powered New York booking agency. Along with Michael Lerner, editor of the liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun, he received a $100,000 advance for a joint book on black-Jewish tensions, an almost unheard-of sum for a scholarly work.

Pressure is building on West to provide instant answers to every racial question, whether he has thought it through or not. For example, after a talk at a bookstore in Berkeley, California, he was confronted by Cherie Chichester-Glass, a veteran elementary school teacher. “I’ve read your book and listened to you talk,” said the teacher. “Hell, how do we put this into practice in the classroom?” West replied with a rambling soliloquy about the need to set priorities and then call on the experts to fill in the details. His response left Chichester-Glass exasperated. “I think he’s a man of prophetic strengths,” she said, “but it’s also obvious he’s never set foot in an elementary school classroom.”

Indeed, despite the freshness of his diagnosis of social problems, West’s prescriptions for curing them can be vague and hopelessly Utopian. He advocates a “politics of conversion” in which blacks and other oppressed people would “affirm themselves as human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds and souls through white lenses and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies.” That would translate into a new surge of grass-roots activism, the building of coalitions between now competing groups, and “large-scale public intervention to ensure access to basic social goods.” In other words, critics charge, reconstituting the 1960s.

Some friends fear the hoopla will prove impossible for West to resist. “You’ve got to understand one thing about Cornel,” says a colleague. “There’s a part of him that wants to be the next H.N.I.C. It’s not just white folks holding him up.” Says Cone: “One of the best ways to destroy someone is to expose and promote him. It’s very hard to be critical of a system that makes a hero out of you.”

West admits he shares his friends’ misgivings. “The same folks who want you to be a public intellectual also want you to be an expert, a visionary, a technician and leader on the ground all at the same time. You can’t do all those things and do them well,” he says. “People will try to shape you into an image of yourself that in no way coincides with your image of yourself. It’s a danger that might be realized, even though I’m fighting against it as hard as I can.”

The time could come, West says, when he will withdraw from the public stage back into the ivory tower to think through the practical implications of his ideas, while sustaining himself with books, the black church and sweet soul music. Meanwhile, friends say, West has read biographies of the great public intellectuals of the past — Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold — to prepare for the highly visible role that is being thrust upon him, not entirely against his will. After all, if a philosopher like West can’t be philosophical about success, who can be?