by Cornel West
From my perspective, Professor Summers can express any views he likes on every subject from affirmative action to Israeli-Palestinian relations. And what better place to debate those issues than a free and open university, rather than one run by an administrator dealing in threats and blatant disrespect? The issue was academic freedom. Yet only an article in Vanity Fair by Brother Sam Tananhaus about the controversy addressed that issue. Most of the others were mere gossip.
The even larger question goes to the nature of academic engagement. I see it as a split between the technocratic and the democratic view of intellectual life. I want to move away from narrow elitism and address the larger culture. I want to reach youth culture. Without sacrificing scholarly excellence, I want to bridge the gap between what’s happening in the ivory towers and what’s happening in the ’hoods. Young folk of all of colors and classes need to know that we’re concerned and involved in their lives. They need to feel that we’re listening to them, not just with our ears but our hearts. They deserve our attention. Our attention is an extension of our love, and without loving compassion, no real dialogue can be established.
The fact that Summers, as the first Jewish president of Harvard—a school with an anti-Semitic and racist legacy—did not feel the need to deal with me and the Afro-American department with respect and sensitivity was a major disappointment. Given the dynamic between blacks and Jews, especially in the world of intellectuals, Summers could have shown real leadership. You lead with respect, not scorn. You treat others honorably, not suspiciously. In the place of haughtiness, you offer curiosity, understanding, and a genuine desire to learn. That the dialogue broke down between me and Professor Summers saddened me deeply. I wish we could have worked it out. But we didn’t, and it was time for me to move on. How else could I respond to such deep disrespect? Nothing that Summers could say would eradicate the way he had dishonored me. And of course I never—not for a single instant—even considered acquiescing to the insulting monitoring program that he had demanded. The cool thing was to simply quit. But where would I go?
I’d first met my dear sister Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton, at the inauguration of my dear sister Ruth Simmons at Brown University. That was the day Professor Simmons became the first black president of an Ivy League school.
“Cornel,” Shirley said to me, “our door is always open to you.”
When I left Harvard, Shirley was good to her word.
“Come on home,” she said.
Her comment reminded me of when I originally came to Princeton to teach at the urging of Toni Morrison. The second time around, when Toni discovered that I was living in a house with no furniture, she graciously gave me a couch and two chairs.
In my discussions with Shirley, I saw that her visionary approach to higher education in many ways mirrored my own. I admired and adored her and, with gratitude, accepted the position— University Professor. The bluesman moves on.
DEATH, TAXES, AND LOVE
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN, I heard an older brother say, “There are only three things in this world, son, that you gotta do—pay taxes, die, and stay black.”
The words stuck but the meaning took time to hit home.
After the legal, professional, and financial challenges facing me, the words hit home. And they hit hard. The tax issues were entangled with the love issues. Ever since I found myself sleeping in Central Park as a result of giving everything to my first wife, Hilda, I hadn’t gotten back on an even keel. Because I was the one who left the marriage—and in Aytul’s case, the relationship—it was especially important to me that my spouse not feel as though I was being anything less than generous. Unfortunately, that put me in a vulnerable position, particularly when lawyers were introduced into the equation.
On top of that, for years I had a bad case of the IRS blues. I got behind and could never catch up. I could give you lots of reasons why but, on the most fundamental level, I can’t excuse myself for creating a monetary mess. No matter how hard I tried, every year I found myself deeper in debt.
Someone once said, referencing James Brown, that “Cornel West is the Ivy League soul brother and the hardest working man in academia.” Naturally I loved the analogy, but I can hardly prove the statement. The distinguished cultural critic, Greg Tate, once wrote to me that my soulful, intellectual work was an extension of James Brown’s funk and Du Bois’s intellectual calling. Other profs teach lots of courses, give lots of lectures, write lots of books, and do lots of political and societal work. I can say, though, that my work ethic is as much a part of my being as my Christian faith. Hard work was instilled in me from the gate. That drive has been a blessing. At some point in my life, the drive was accelerated when it became married to a mission. The mission was connected to a passion that has grown stronger every year.
When I arrived at Harvard as a teenager, I went through the experience of being born again. The Christian connotation is not inappropriate. Academically, intellectually, and spiritually, I was willing to die to emerge a more courageous, loving, and decent human being. Old assumptions were challenged. I was introduced to new ways of thinking—ancient ways of thinking, modern ways of thinking, non-Western ways of thinking—that resulted in the reconstitution of my psyche. After Harvard, I’d never be the same again.
At the same time—praise God!—I found that the new me and the old me could sit side by side in the church of my grandfather. I had developed intense scrutiny, only to learn that precepts of my childhood faith measured up to the test—and then some. The lesson taught by my elders—the same lesson, in fact, that their elders taught them—was that love is the core of it all. The rest is just sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. To come from a people who were denigrated, enslaved, and despised, and still place love in the center of life is to be part of a miracle. To love myself without hating others—even and especially those who may harbor hatred for me—is another expression of that miracle.
My conclusion became my calling: that justice is what love looks like in public, just as deep democracy is what justice looks like in practice. When you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unjustly. Justice is not simply an abstract concept to regulate institutions, but also a fire in the bones to promote the well-being of all.
Given my passion for love and its many healing forms, I have to ask myself these questions: why have I so often found myself in financial and romantic disrepair? Part of me wants to avoid the question and, instead, point to the successes that these women enjoyed after our relationship ended. I want to tell you that Elleni has become an international spokeswoman for the effort to conquer AIDS. The woman I met in a Howard Johnson restaurant so many years ago has emerged into a political leader who speaks in public before tens of thousands of people the world over. She is the head of the AIDS project at Harvard and often meets with the highest-ranking United Nations officials involved in solving the crisis. Stanford University has recognized her extraordinary work.
Hilda has had a number of careers, each more successful than the last. Today, she runs her own high-tech electronics firm and has become a businesswoman of ingenuity and integrity. Ramona is perhaps the most-loved schoolteacher in all of New York City, a shining light and positive influence in the lives of her many students.
Mary Johnson and Michele Wallace continue to make their mark in the highest of intellectual circles. And of course the divine Kathleen Battle continues to grace the stages of concert halls and opera houses in the great cities of world culture. Aytul continues her work as an outstanding journalist and author. And Leslie continues to thrive in heart and mind.
Thus I build my case as a blessed man, a man who has known, lived with, and loved these beautiful women. But I also realize that my inability to stay with a woman cannot be counted as character strength. I look, for example, at the character of my own father and his unmatched example as a family man of stability and remarkable integrity. The mature love between Mom and Dad set a standard I could never ever a
pproximate, let alone achieve.
Only a few months ago, some fifteen years after Dad had passed, an extraordinary thing happened to me. After a lecture in Memphis, several hundred people lined up just to say hello. One of them, though, stopped me cold.
“You don’t know me, Brother West,” he said, “but I knew your mama Irene, your sisters Cheryl and Cynthia, your brother Cliff, and your daddy. I was in Shiloh with Reverend Cooke. I even knew your man Deacon Hinton. I knew ’em all.”
“Lord, have mercy!” I said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Nate Walker. And I’ve stood in line not only to tell you that you gave a good word today, Brother West, but also to tell you something about your daddy you never knew. You see, I worked with the man at McClellan Air Force base. Yes sir, I worked beside Cliff West for many years. He was the leader of the black caucus on the base, where everyone knew that racism was intense. We just didn’t get promoted. Discrimination was rampant.
“Well, one day your father was asked by his superiors to write a report about which jobs could be eliminated among the black employees. Cliff took the assignment seriously. A week later, he read the report to both us and the white power establishment. There was only one recommendation: that Cliff’s own job be eliminated. We were shocked. Couldn’t believe it. Rather than doing us in, he offered himself up as a sacrificial lamb.
“In the end, though, the white folk wouldn’t fire him. You see, he was their bridge builder between us and them. They also knew that we’d go crazy if anything happened to big Cliff. So nothing did happen. He told us not to tell anyone, especially your mama. Miss Irene wouldn’t be happy knowing that her husband, with all them mouths to feed, had put his neck on the chopping block like that. But believe you me, when your daddy walked through that base, every last one of us bowed down to him.
“So when I hear you talking on television that you ain’t half the man your daddy was, much as I respect you, Brother West, I couldn’t agree more.”
Amen.
TEACHABLE MOMENTS
SOME ENTERTAINERS ARE ALSO BLESSED to be profound teachers. I think of the genius of Bob Dylan. Dylan came to mind not long ago when I was at the airport on my way to Germany for Zeytun’s birthday. I was at the gate talking to Mom on the cell when I noticed a brother patiently waiting to approach me. When I hung up, he came over and, with a sweet sincerity, said, “Professor West, my name is Winston, and I’ve only wanted to meet two people in my life. Frederick Douglass and you. I’ll never meet Frederick, but thank God today I can meet you.”
“Well, thank you, my dear brother,” I said. “That’s a mighty compliment.”
“I don’t want to take up too much of your time, professor,” Winston went on to say, “but I do have to tell you this: I’ve played drums for Bob Dylan for years. We travel the world together, and sometimes your name comes up. Both Bob and I love and respect you. Once, when I mentioned you to Bob, he said something I’ll never forget. ‘Cornel West,’ said Dylan, ‘is a man who lives his life out loud.’”
“Lord, have mercy!” I said. “I’ve never heard that formulation before. Tell Brother Dylan that I love him as well, and that even though he doesn’t know me personally, he sure-enough knows my heart.”
Dylan’s heart rests in his vocation. He is a white bluesman par excellence. His voice is born out of that vocation, informed by a vision rooted in reaching and teaching as many people as possible.
Reaching and teaching is my greatest joy as well, especially lighting a fire in the minds of young people. Every year at Princeton I insist on teaching freshmen. I want to be part of their academic lives, knowing that connecting with them at an early juncture might move their stories in a positive direction.
In my freshman seminar on “The Tragic, The Comic, and The Political,” we read works such as Plato’s Republic, Sophocles’s Antigone, Dante’s Inferno, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, essays by Kant and Hume, fiction by Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Nathanael West, and plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Hansberry, Lorca, Williams, O’Neill, Soyinka, and Beckett. The course focuses on the never-ending activity of paideia—deep education—and the problem of evil. Freshmen begin with a sense of trepidation in the face of this formidable parade of great texts.
How does my freshman seminar in humanities differ from those of my colleagues? My lens as a bluesman is to begin with the catastrophic, the horrendous, the calamitous and monstrous in life. So Plato’s discussion of death that inaugurates the Republic, Hamlet’s discussion of Yorick with the grave diggers in Shakespeare’s classic play, or Gregor’s transformation into a huge, foul vermin in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis initiates us into the traumatic coping with “humando”—with burial, death, and the worms waiting for us in the soil. In this way, the tragicomic sensibilities of a bluesman are an essential feature of the rich humanist tradition.
Initially, students are quite shaken with this stress on the fragility of their lives and the inevitability of their own death. Yet as they examine these great texts and see the centrality of death and rebirth, of learning how to die to learn how to live, they are initiated into paideia. I consider this a life-long initiation in deep education, a priceless contribution to their lives and to my life as a teacher. In fact, my enthusiastic teaching itself at my beloved Princeton is a living testimony to the sheer transformative power of paideia.
TEACHABLE MOMENTS DO NOT JUST HAPPEN in the classroom. They are shot through everyday life and take place in a variety of contexts. To be teachable is to muster the courage to listen generously, think critically, and be open to the ambiguity and mystery of life. For example, I began as a fierce critic of black leaders Reverand Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Bishop T.D. Jakes, and Barack Obama. But after breaking bread with all five and spending countless hours in rich dialogue, I realized how short-sighted I had been. All five men had much to teach me, and I certainly had a deep love for each of them. We vowed to continue the conversation for the rest of our lives. Of course, it mattered that we disagreed deeply on many subjects. But what mattered more was the mutual love and respect that came out of those meetings.
THERE WAS ANOTHER IMPROMPTU MEETING that took me by surprise. I was at Reagan Airport in D.C., munching on a hot dog in the waiting area, when I looked up to see Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his beloved wife standing nearby.
I approached the justice and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I just spoke at a school where you had spoken and given encouragement to young students.”
“Thank you. It’s a pleasure to meet you too, Professor West. I do have to say, though, you’ve uttered some awfully harsh words about me.”
“Yes, they were based on principle and had nothing to do with personal attacks.”
“I do welcome criticism and wish we had more time to discuss our differences. Please feel free to visit my home.”
With that, we hugged and went our separate ways. It is this spirit of breaking bread that I cherish.
ONE OF MY GRAND MOMENTS of being taught took place during the presidential campaign of my dear brother Bill Bradley. During the Iowa primary, I met the Boston Celtic star, Bill Russell. His wisdom blew me away. I shall never forget his profound and poignant words. He told Brother Bradley and me “to absorb wounds with dignity and turn defiance into determination and to win with integrity.” If ever there was a grand bluesman in sports, it was Bill Russell.
I also cherish historical links and historical continuity. Like my favorite philosopher Gadamer, tradition is central to my understanding of vocation. But it is a tradition of critique and resistance. At its best, it is a tradition of bearing witness to love and justice.
AS A FRESHMAN AT HARVARD, I experienced such a historical link in this grand tradition when attending the lectures of Shirley Graham Du Bois, the widow of the W.E.B. Du Bois, the greatest black scholar ever to walk the streets of America.
Yet the story of another such witness both alarmed and troubled me.
It was 1990, and
I was walking with John Hope Franklin, the second most famous black scholar, in the hills of Bellagio, Italy. We were attending a conference put together by the prophetic figure, Marian Wright Edelman, for poor black children. Above us, the sky was a baby blue. Below us, Lake Como was comforting and calm. Professor Franklin, a man of quiet dignity with an enchanting smile, was in a reflective mood.
“Cornel,” he said, “let me tell you a story that I rarely share. It’s about me and W.E.B. Du Bois.”
“Wow. Did you know him well?”
“No one knew him that well, but my first encounter with him was extraordinary.”
“What was it like?”
“I was at a hotel in North Carolina in 1938. I recognized W.E.B. Du Bois sitting in the lobby. He was reading a newspaper. I approached him with great respect and anticipation.
“‘Dr. Du Bois,’ I said, ‘good morning, sir. My name is John Hope Franklin.’
“Du Bois did not react. His eyes remained fixated on the newspaper to the point that he didn’t even acknowledge my presence. No matter, I wasn’t about to leave. After all, this was the great W.E.B. Du Bois.
‘Dr. Du Bois,’ I reiterated, ‘I am named after John Hope, the president of Atlanta University.’
“Still, no reaction. But, Cornel, I could not imagine leaving without some interaction. So one last time, I said, ‘Sir, I am a Harvard graduate student in the same program that awarded you your Ph.D.’
