by Cornel West
The state of Black America in the age of Obama has been one of desperation, confusion, and capitulation. The desperation is rooted in the escalating suffering on every front. The confusion arises from a conflation of symbol and substance. The capitulation rests on an obsessive need to protect the first Black president against all forms of criticism. Black desperation is part of a broader desperation among poor and working people during the age of Obama. The bailout of Wall Street by the Obama administration, rather than the bailout of homeowners, hurt millions of working people. The refusal of the Obama administration to place a priority on jobs with a living wage reinforced massive unemployment, and the sheer invisibility of poor people’s plight in public policy has produced more social despair among weak and vulnerable citizens. The unprecedented historical symbolism of the first Black president has misled many if not most Black people to downplay his substantial neoliberal policies and elevate his (and his family’s) brilliant and charismatic presence. Needless to say, the presence of his brilliant and charismatic wife, Michelle—a descendent of enslaved and Jim-Crowed people, unlike himself—even more deeply legitimates his symbolic status, a status that easily substitutes for substantial achievement. The cowardly capitulation of Black leadership to Obama’s neoliberal policies in the name of the Black prophetic tradition is pathetic. The role of the NAACP, National Urban League, and Black corporate media pundits, who so quickly became Obama apologists, constitutes a fundamental betrayal of the Black prophetic tradition. The very idea of Black prophetic voices as an extension of a neoliberal and imperial US regime is a violation of what the Black prophetic tradition has been and is. This violation enrages me when I think of the blood, sweat, and tears of the people who created and sustained this precious tradition. The righteous indignation of the Black prophetic tradition targets not only the oppressive system that dominates us but also the fraudulent figures who pose and posture as prophetic ones while the suffering of the people is hidden and concealed. To sell one’s soul for a mess of Obama pottage is to trash the priceless Black prophetic tradition. Is it not hypocritical to raise one’s voice when the pharaoh is white but have no critical word to say when the pharaoh is Black? If the boot is on our neck, does it make any difference what color the foot is in the boot? Moral integrity, political consistency, and systemic analysis sit at the center of the Black prophetic tradition.
Since the rise of the neoliberal regime, the Black struggle for freedom has been cast or reduced to an interest group, one among other such groups in American politics. Even the motto of the Black Congressional Caucus, the apex of Black elected officials, is “We have no permanent friends or permanent enemies—only permanent interests.” How morally empty and ethically deficient this motto is—no reference to moral principles, ethical standards, or grand visions of justice for all; just permanent interests, like the Business Roundtable for Wall Street oligarchs, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for the security of Israel, or the National Rifle Association for gun ownership. The Black prophetic tradition indeed includes interests but goes far beyond such narrow calculations and stresses a moral high ground of fairness and justice for all. The Black prophetic tradition surely begins on the chocolate side of town, but like the blues and jazz, it has a universal message for all human beings concerned about justice and freedom.
It is no accident that the “permanent interests” of the Black Congressional Caucus so quickly became Black middle-class interests given the neoliberal regime to which they were accommodating. To be a highly successful Black professional or politician is too often to be well adjusted to injustice and well adapted to indifference toward poor people, including Black poor people. The Black prophetic tradition is fundamentally committed to the priority of poor and working people, thus pitting it against the neoliberal regime, capitalist system, and imperial policies of the US government. The Black prophetic tradition has never been confined to the interests and situations of Black people. It is rooted in principles and visions that embrace these interests and confront the situations, but its message is for the country and world. The Black prophetic tradition has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf. When the Black prophetic tradition is strong, poor and working people of all colors benefit. When the Black prophetic tradition is weak, poor and working class people are overlooked. On the international level, when the Black prophetic tradition is vital and vibrant, anti-imperial critiques are intense, and the plight of the wretched of the earth is elevated. What does it profit a people for a symbolic figure to gain presidential power if we turn our backs from the suffering of poor and working people, and thereby lose our souls? The Black prophetic tradition has tried to redeem the soul of our fragile democratic experiment. Is it redeemable?
—CW
NOTES
Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Black Prophetic Fire
1. Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Tragic,” in West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, vol. 1, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 45; cf. Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 114.
2. West, “Pragmatism and the Tragic,” 32.
3. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 147.
4. James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1992), 26; cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 170.
Chapter One: It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire
1. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” speech at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 188–206 (hereafter cited as Selected Speeches). One of Douglass’s most powerful orations, it is best known in its abbreviated version published by Douglass himself, with other extracts from his speeches, under the title “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in an appendix to his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom in Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1855; New York: Library of America, 1994), 431–35.
2. Angela Davis’s first lecture as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles was on Frederick Douglass. “Angela said for a people in slavery ‘the first condition of freedom is an open act of resistance—physical resistance, violent resistance.’” Howard Moore Jr., “Angela—Symbol in Resistance,” in If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Y. Davis et al. (New York: Third Press, 1971), 191–92. See also chap. 3, n. 31.
3. Toward the end of his life, Douglass gave two speeches against the “frequent and increasing resort to lynch law in our Southern States.” “Lynch Law in the South” was published in the renowned North American Review (July 1892); reprinted in Selected Speeches, 746. According to the editor, “[A]ll the fire of his early years returned as Douglass struck out hard against the defenders of lynching” (Selected Speeches, 746). Provoked by the outcry it caused, Douglass extended his attack in his last major address, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” published in a pamphlet entitled The Lesson of the Hour (1894); reprinted in Selected Speeches, 750–76.
4. “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, delivered at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876,” in Selected Speeches, 616–24. The sculptor Thomas Ball had designed the statue that Douglass criticized later for presenting “the Negro on his knees when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom” (615). Yet Douglass failed to come up to his own standards expressed in his 1852 oration (see above, n. 1), when he had demanded: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future” (193).
5. Owing to a result of a highly contested election, the nineteenth president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, was inaugurated in early March 1877 as a result of the s
o-called “Compromise of 1877,” which allowed the Republicans to claim the presidency in exchange for ending the implementation of Reconstruction in the Southern states. Immediately afterwards, Hayes appointed Douglass United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, and despite substantial opposition, Douglass was confirmed by the Senate on March 17, 1877. According to Douglass, one of the reasons against his appointment was that “a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves” should perform the ceremony “of introducing the aristocratic citizens of the republic to the President of the United States” (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself, in Autobiographies, 856). Although Douglass had protested the diminishing Republican commitment to Reconstruction during the election campaign, he was silent when the newly elected president decided to withdraw federal troops from the South.
6. “Yeah, brother, you find me in a crack house before you find me in the White House.” Jeff Sharlet, “The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues,” Rolling Stone, May 28, 2009.
7. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995).
8. Herman Melville juxtaposes the illusion of individual autonomy with the reality of social interdependence, when, in chap. 108 of Moby-Dick, he has Ahab, the epitome of human hubris, complain about his dependence on the carpenter who is in the process of crafting an artificial leg for him: “Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers.” Moby-Dick or The Whale (Evanston: Northwestern University Press/Newberry Library, 1988), 471–72.
9. The two prominent Abolitionists authorize, as it were, Douglass’s narrative; see William Lloyd Garrison’s preface and a letter by Wendell Phillips to Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), in Douglass, Autobiographies, 3–10, 11–13.
10. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Carlsbad, CA: Smiley Books, 2009).
11. Douglass, Narrative, in Autobiographies, 33.
12. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in Autobiographies, 169.
13. Douglass, Life and Times (1881; rev. 1893), in Autobiographies, 492.
14. For an extended argument, see Christa Buschendorf, ‘“Properly Speaking There Are in the World No Such Men as Self-Made Men’: Frederick Douglass’s Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery,” in Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790–1900, ed. Günter Leypoldt (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2013), 159–84.
15. Douglass, Narrative, in Autobiographies, 97.
16. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), trans. from the second German edition by Marian Evans (London: Chapman, 1854; New York: Blanchard, 1855). Based on a fundamental critique of Hegelian idealism, Feuerbach interpreted religion anthropologically, claiming that God is a mere projection of human beings that reflects their desire for self-transcendence.
17. In 1860, Douglass read Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity with his German friend Ottilie Assing, who seems to have tried to convert Douglass to agnosticism and in a letter to Feuerbach (1871) claimed, “Douglass has become your enthusiastic admirer.” See Maria Diedrich, Love Across the Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 227–29. See also the allusion to Feuerbach in a letter by Assing to Douglass (Jan. 6, 1879), in which she encouraged him to write a sequel to his second autobiography that “would furnish an abundance of [. . .] highly interesting material, and of all things your conversion to free thinking, how through your own courage and strength, with Feuerbach tendering a helping hand to you as it were, you broke the chains of a second bondage.” Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass, ed., trans., and introduced by Christoph Lohmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 351. Douglass, however, preferred not to mention Feuerbach in Life and Times.
18. In Douglass’s 1846 report of his visit to the Scottish town of Ayr, the birthplace of “the brilliant genius,” he describes the social position of the poet in terms reminiscent of his own recent experiences: “Burns lived in the midst of a bigoted and besotted clergy—a pious but corrupt generation—a proud, ambitious, and contemptuous aristocracy, who, esteemed a little more than a man, and looked upon the plowman, such as was the noble Burns, as being little better than a brute.” Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1., Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 153. The eighteenth-century poet was a stern critic of false claims of authority, a passionate spokesperson for the working poor, and a resolute defender of the dignity of the common man. Not surprisingly, “Douglass had a special fondness for the highland singer shared by many American Negroes.” Arna Bontemps, Free At Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 127. Almost fifty years after his tour through Scotland, Douglass connected the suppression of independent thinking in his former life as a slave with Burns’s poem “Man Was Made to Mourn”: “Obedience was the duty of the slave. I in my innocence once told my old master that I thought a certain way of doing some work I had in hand the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, ‘Who gave you a right to think?’ I might have answered in the language of Robert Burns, ‘Were I designed your lordling’s slave, / By Nature’s law designed, / Why was an independent thought / E’er placed in my mind?’ But I had not then read Robert Burns. Burns had high ideas of the dignity of simple manhood.” “The Blessing of Liberty and Education” (1894), in The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 5, 1881–95, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 565.
19. “Hereditary bondmen, know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?” Douglass quotes the famous couplet from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto ii, stanza 76, at the end of chap. 17 of My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he describes the long victorious battle with the notorious slave breaker Covey, a victory that Douglass considered the turning point in his life as a slave (Autobiographies, 287). Douglass’s library contained both The Works of Robert Burns (1837) and The Works of Lord Byron (New York: Blake, 1840). See William L. Petrie and Douglas E. Stover, eds., Bibliography of the Frederick Douglass Library at Cedar Hill (Fort Washington, MD: Silesia Companies, 1995).
20. John T. Grayson is still at Mt. Holyoke, where he conducts research on the women in Douglass’s life.
21. Autobiographies, 431, 432.
22. See Christa Buschendorf, “The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community,” in The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, ed. Laura Bieger et al. (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, 2013), 84–106.
23. Here and elsewhere in our dialogue, West refers to the title of what has become the classic of anticolonialism by the trained psychiatrist, Marxian revolutionary humanist, and activist Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1963); new edition, trans. Richard Philcox, foreword by Homi K. Bhaba (New York: Grove Press, 2004). For Fanon’s influence on the Black Power movement, see David Macey’s acclaimed biography, Frantz Fanon (2000; London: Verso, 2012), 23.
24. “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25: 40.
25. In reflecting upon critiques of optimism, West mentions major French and German eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire’s most famous work, Candide, or Optimism (1759), is a satire on philosophic optimism represented by the protagonist’s mentor Pangloss. In Rameau’s Nephew (written between 1760 and 1774), Denis Diderot criticizes contemporary French society in the form of a highly satirical philosophic dialogue. The major philosopher of German ide
alism, Immanuel Kant, postulated man’s exercise of rationality and self-determination (What Is Enlightenment? 1784), but in his philosophy of religion he saw a propensity of human beings toward radical evil (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 1793). The playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing put his ideal of brotherly love and religious tolerance into his drama Nathan the Wise (1779); in his various contributions to contemporary theological controversies he was known for his position of critical questioning.
26. John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 210.
27. “An organic intellectual, in contrast to traditional intellectuals who often remain comfortably nested in the academy, attempts to be entrenched in and affiliated with organizations, associations, and, possibly, movements of grass-roots folk.” Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 234. The conception of the “organic intellectual” stems from the Italian thinker in the Marxist tradition, Antonio Gramsci, who discusses it in his essay “The Intellectual Selections from the Prison Notebooks.” See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–23. West has appropriated Gramsci’s core concept of hegemony (“the set of formal ideas and beliefs and informal modes of behavior, habits, manners, sensibilities, and outlooks that support and sanction the existing order”) and his view of “organic intellectuals as leaders and thinkers directly tied into a particular cultural group primarily by means of institutional affiliations” to the Black prophetic tradition as early as Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002; anniversary ed. with a new preface by the author), 119, 121. In his book on American pragmatism, West explains why his own concept of prophetic pragmatism “is inspired by the example of Antonio Gramsci [. . .] the major twentieth-century philosopher of praxis, power, and provocation” whose “work is historically specific, theoretically engaging, and politically activistic in an exemplary manner” (American Evasion of Philosophy, 231).
