by Cornel West
Imperial meltdown is the immoral blowback of the American way of war—defeat, destroy, devastate—on the public and private lives of citizens of the American republic. The deep denial of race matters in American history—with notable exceptions like the Civil War or the Civil Rights Movement—is an example of the more pro-found denial of empire matters in the emergence and sustenance of America. America was a business project before it became a democratic experiment. America was a settler-colonial endeavor of the British Empire (and others) before it became a revolutionary break from King George III. And the revolutionary American effort was built on Indigenous peoples’ land and bodies, as well as on Black peoples’ enslavement and expropriation. In short, imperial expansion, predatory capitalism, and white supremacy were the driving background conditions for the very possibility of the precious democratic idea and its practice in America. Let us not forget, imperial democracy has its own structures of domination.
Our present-day imperial meltdown is a distant echo of the imperial meltdown in Europe that followed World War II—the moment that brought the Age of Europe (1492–1945) to an end. The American century began with only the Soviet Empire as a serious opponent. And the fall of the Soviet Empire, in 1991, yielded full-fledged American imperial sway. Almost three decades since its uncontested claim of world-power status, America has followed the route of all empires in human history: machismo might, insecure hysteria, and predictable hubris. Like all empires, the American Empire has been unaccountable to its victims. In this way, race matters are an integral part—though not the sole part—of empire matters.
Imperial meltdown goes hand in hand with spiritual blackout primarily because in human history, chickens do come home to roost. American mendacity and criminality (past and present)—our lies and crimes—are more and more difficult to hide and conceal. The scope of American callousness and indifference to poor and vulnerable people here and abroad is too vast to ignore. Our greed and self-promotion for short-term gain and superficial success impede any serious quest for moral exemplarity and spiritual greatness. America is a grand example of the biblical challenge: what does it profit an empire to gain the whole world and lose its soul? Some have claimed that America never had a soul—does any empire have a soul? Or are there simply exemplary prophetic figures and movements that try to hold empires accountable from the vantage point of their victims? Does not every imperial project headed toward a Promised Land or Exodus need a Canaanite reading for moral and spiritual purposes? Or does not every empire await its moment of imperial meltdown?
The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity. Yet his triumph flows from the implosion of a Republican Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and big scapegoating of vulnerable peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women; from a Democratic Party establishment beholden to big money, big military, and the clever deployment of peoples of color, LGBTQ peoples, immigrants, Muslims, and women to hide and conceal the lies and crimes of neoliberal policies here and abroad; and from a corporate media establishment that aided and abetted Trump owing to high profits and revenues.
It is too easy and shortsighted to blame Trump alone for American imperial decay and decline. Within the narrow yet noteworthy constraints of electoral politics, the Bernie Sanders campaign was a great missed opportunity for race matters in this moment; the largest and most progressive bloc of the Democratic Party refused to support the most progressive candidate in the primaries—Black democrats turned away from Bernie Sanders. The power and influence of Black politicians to uplift Hillary Clinton and degrade Bernie Sanders was quite revealing. The neoliberal patronage system and the Clinton machine through Black churches, businesses, radio, and civic networks pushed Sanders (and those of us in his camp) to the margins in Black America. And the strong popularity of Barack and Michelle Obama sealed the Clinton candidacy—a neoliberal candidacy ill-equipped to deal with the spiritual blackout and imperial melt down in our moment.
The painful truth is there is no Donald Trump without Barack Obama, no neofascist stirrings without neoliberal policies—all within the imperial zone. Obama was the brilliant Black smiling face of the American Empire. Trump is the know-nothing white cruel face of the American Empire. Obama did not produce Trump, but his Wall Street–friendly policies helped facilitate Trump’s pseudo-populist victory. Obama’s reluctance to confront race matters in a serious and substantive manner did not cause the ugly white backlash, but Obama’s hesitancy did not help the opposition to white-supremacist practices. And, more pointedly, both Obama and Trump—two different faces of the imperial meltdown—supported military buildups, wars against Muslim countries, drone strikes, the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people, illegal imprisonments of innocent people, night raids on poor Muslim families, and inhumane detention camps. These war policies and war crimes have come back to devour what is left of America’s democratic soul.
Every day of the Obama and Trump administrations, America has been at war with at least five Muslim countries. The Nobel Prize–winning Physicians for Social Responsibility estimate that we killed around 1 million people in Iraq; 220,000 in Afghanistan; and 80,000 in Pakistan. The Nobel Prize–winning Barack Obama dropped 26,171 bombs during his last year in office—even as he said not a mumbling word when 550 Palestinian babies were killed by US-supported Israeli planes in fifty days in Gaza! Imperial meltdown is a reminder that we reap what we sow—money spent on bombs dropped abroad (as in Somalia, Yemen, Syria) result in decrepit schools, indecent housing, unemployment, and mass incarcerations regimes at home. Both Obama and Trump supported military establishments whose very aim is to maintain “full-spectrum dominance” on land and sea or in the air, outer space, and cyberspace. As the Pulitzer Prize winner John W. Dower notes in The Violent American Century (2017), our Pentagon’s annual budget is more than that of the next eight countries combined, and our war profiteers are the largest supplier of weapons worldwide, responsible for nearly half of all arms transfers. In addition, we have 4,855 bases, including 587 overseas in 42 countries, and special operation forces deployed in 150 countries.
The military might of the American Empire—which, according to Common Dreams, spends 53 cents of every taxpayer dollar in the US budget—casts a large shadow on our domestic life. Brute force, raw violence, and machismo identity are glamourized in our popular culture, glorified in our history (as in our popular myth of the frontier as a place of moral regeneration through conquest over savages), and commercialized as the most effective way to win in life, politics, finance, and romance. In this way, imperial meltdown and spiritual blackout are inseparable. And, at this point, race matters and empire matters are indivisible.
The greatest tradition of prophetic fightback in the American Empire is the Black freedom struggle. The greatest tradition of moral and spiritual fortitude in the American Empire is the Black musical tradition. W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Martin Luther King Jr., James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Ella Baker, Victoria Garvin, Barbara Ransby, Angela Davis, Robin D. G. Kelley, bell hooks, Amiri Baraka, Lorraine Hansberry, Haki Madhubuti, Maulana Karenga, and others represent the best of the Black freedom struggle. John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louie Armstrong, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Aretha Franklin, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie Parker, Geri Allen, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Mahalia Jackson, Thelonious Monk, the Dramatics, B. B.King, and many others represent the best of the Black musical tradition. The artistic excellence in the best of Black music—including the magnanimity and majesty of the sound—sets the standards for the Black freedom struggle. These standards consist of radical freedom in love and radical love in freedom—the freedom to tell
the truth in love about one’s self and world, and the love of the truth as one freely speaks and lives.
The distinctive benchmark of Black music is soulful kenosis—the courageous and compassionate styles of genuine self-emptying that give all one is and has to empower, enable, and ennoble others. In this metaphoric way, the greatest Black musicians and Black freedom fighters are the truth, in that they embody and enact a radical love (especially for an unloved people) by freely giving all they are and have to inspire and encourage others. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, and the condition of being the truth is to transform your suffering with great creativity and compassion into forms and deeds that empower others to do likewise in their own ways. So in the face of kinds of death—social death, civic death, psychic death, physical death, or spiritual death—we choose desire for life, love, and laughter. In the face of types of dogma—of doctrine, prejudice, method, or ideology—we choose dialogical struggle and polyphonic communication (lift every voice—not echo).And in the face of domination—empire, white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, homophobia, transphobia—we choose self-respect, self-defense, and self-determination of persons, communities, and societies.
The saddest feature of moral and spiritual race matters in our time is that imperial meltdown and spiritual blackout have infiltrated, permeated, and, in some ways, devastated the Black musical and freedom traditions. And since these traditions are much of the prophetic leaven in the American democratic loaf, our moment has become even more bleak. The wholesale neoliberal attempt to sabotage and hijack the best of the Black freedom struggle and musical tradition is glaring. Spectacle triumphs over spiritual substance, image over moral imagination, money over political mission, career over sacrificial calling, profession over visionary vocation, and success over genuine greatness. So, just as precious Black poor people were crushed by predatory capitalism, our Black professional class has shifted from a discourse on poverty to one of diversity. Just as Black working people are pushed out of jobs and neighborhoods, our Black politicians shift from talk about jobs with a living wage to talk of urban zones of gentrification and upward mobility. Just as police departments target young Black women and men with stop-and-frisk and “three strikes you’re out,” Black elites shift talk from civilian and community accountability of police to policies of militarizing police departments and criminalizing poor Black youth. In this way, the Black managerial and middle class must take responsibility for too often being callous and indifferent to its Black poor and working-class citizens. And on the musical front, the oligarchs—with their Black professional attendants—in the recording, video, radio, and live performance industries have too often dumbed down the music for pecuniary gain, eliminated most soulful group performers for big-name celebrities-to-be, and unleashed vicious stereotypes of women, men, LGBTQ people, and others in the name of “keeping it real.” This ugly assault on the Black musical tradition is a form of neoliberal spiritual warfare, a market-driven attack on the very souls of Black folk. The common message of the neoliberal regimes’ politics, culture, or soulcraft is this: sell your soul for a mess of pottage (spectacle, image, money, status), then pose and posture as if you are or stand for sacrificial love and genuine freedom. Let us not be deceived; this message is the death knell of the Black freedom struggle and Black musical tradition. There can be no fakes, phonies, or counterfeits in the Black musical and freedom struggle—too much is at stake.
The Movement for Black Lives is a grand sign of hope. It is an exemplary collective effort to put prophetic fight back in our bleak moment of imperial meltdown and spiritual blackout. The prophetic vision and social analyses of the Movement for Black Lives begin with the most vulnerable, such as the precious LGBTQ people subject to massive trauma and terror. In this way, the terror and trauma suffered by the people in Gaza, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and India (especially with Dalit peoples) are inseparable from the trauma and terror in Baltimore, Ferguson, Oakland, and Chicago. This intimate connection of race matters and empire matters are accented in the powerful programmatic platform of the Movement for Black Lives, representing over fifty organizations, including such figures as Charlene Carruthers, Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, Patrisse Cullors, umi selah, Nyle Fort, the Reverend Osagyefo Sekou, Tef Poe, and many others. This visionary platform links the crucial issues of poverty, quality public schools, serious jobs programs, universal health care, demilitarized police departments, reparations, and strong solidarity with the struggles of peasants in Latin America, Kurds in Turkey, workers in Africa and Asia, Palestinians in Israel, and the Dalits in India.
Another sign of hope is the Reverend William J. Barber II, the most Martin Luther King–like figure in our time. His Moral Monday movement and now the Poor People’s Campaign is, alongside people such as Father Michael Pfleger and his great ministry at St. Sabina Church in Chicago, the Reverend Katie M. Ladd at Queen Anne United Methodist Church in Seattle, and the Reverend Michael Mc-Bride at the Way Christian Center in Berkeley, California, the last hope for prophetic Christianity in America.
Like the Movement for Black Lives, the March 8, 2017, women’s mobilization was a grand sign of hope. It shattered the neoliberal hegemony of the Women’s March of January 21, 2017, over the “feminist” label. In stark contrast to the fashionable corporate feminism, boss feminism, and top-down feminism of the corporate media, the March 8 women’s mobilization put class matters, gender matters, and LGBTQ matters at the center of race matters and empire matters. So it shut down workplaces in the United States and Latin America. It put homophobia and transphobia at the core of any serious feminist vision and analysis—along with predatory capitalism and imperialism.
The historic moment of Standing Rock, in which Indigenous nations came together in a struggle for sacred lands, self-respect, and control over resources was another grand sign of hope. This monumental coming together of Indigenous peoples—echoes of Sitting Bull’s efforts and Wounded Knee struggles—fused race matters and empire matters with earth matters. Military veterans and disabled activists of all colors, along with committed ecological activists, came together to stop the predatory capitalist pipeline companies from invading and colonizing sacred lands. In fact, the mounting coalition—or solidarity work—of ecological mobilizations led by Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein, with peoples of color here and around the world, is a beacon of hope.
The kind of hard-hitting, truth-telling work of Black Agenda Report—by Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberly, Bruce Dixon, Nellie Bailey, Ajamu Baraka, and Danny Haiphong—helped keep alive the Black radical tradition during the Obama years of Black celebration and capitulation. The intellectual integrity of the late great Cedric Robinson, the exhaustive research of Gerald Horne, and the brilliance of Adolph Reed Jr. are three sources of inspiration in a moment of Black academic wanderlust. The longevity of the grand James Cone—the greatest liberation theologian to emerge from the American Empire—remains a measure of any talk of race matters in our time. And the words of Mumia Abu-Jamal, Chris Hedges, Bill Ayers, Henry Giroux, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Paul Street—often visible on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! TV and radio shows—bear serious witness to revolutionary politics today.
There is a delicate balance between preserving a critical perspective while having access to the academic establishment—as in the serious scholarship of figures like Imani Perry, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Eddie Glaude, Jeff Stout, Paul Taylor, Matthew Briones, Julius Bailey, David Kim, Tricia Rose, Fred Moten, Lucius Outlaw, Tommy Curry, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Lawrence Bobo, Tommy Shelby, Michelle Alexander, and Brandon Terry. The dean of the Black academic establishment—Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University—as well as Minister Louis Farrakhan, Malik Zulu Shabazz, Professor Robert George of Princeton, and Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, are dear brothers, despite our ideological disagreements.
Since the prophetic fire lit by hope has been so damped by neoliberal chatter about “hope,” I prefer to be a h
ope rather than talk about hope. Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage, and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor, and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth.
Race matters in the twenty-first century are part of a moral and spiritual war over resources, power, souls, and sensibilities. In the face of the American way of war—defeat, destroy, devastate—I have the Black freedom struggle and the Black musical tradition. I also pull from the rich resources of the LGBTQ communities, the feminist movement, Indigenous peoples’ struggles, the environmental justice and otherly abled communities, and immigrant rights and anti-imperialist organizations. This moral and spiritual way of war—remembrance, reverence, and resurrection—yields a radical love and revolutionary praxis. We remember the great visionary and exemplary figures and movements. These precious memories focus our attention on things that really matter—not spectacle, image, money, and status but integrity, honesty, dignity, and generosity. This focus locates and situates us in a long tradition of love warriors—not just polished professionals or glitzy celebrities—but courageous truth tellers who fell in love with the quest for justice, freedom, and beauty. And all great love—like John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”—is resurrectionary. All great love transforms death into new life, turns your world upside-down, shatters callousness and indifference, frees you to treat people more decently and humanely, and bids you to choose a life of struggle with a smile and style, and greet the worms after our time in the world with a warm welcome of “I lived, I loved, I laughed, and I went down swinging like Muhammad Ali and Ella Fitzgerald!”
