Welcome everybody to the 2021 Reverend Dr
Martin Luther King lecture in social justice. We are presenting the lecture in a
format unlike any other we've done before reflecting a year unlike any other. And in keeping with this theme I am pleased to say we have today a speaker unlike any other, my dear friend
and colleague, professor Cornel West . For organizing this event, my thanks go out to
professor Margo Crawford and the talented team at the Center for Africana Studies. Theirs is
a special talent helping us to consider what we all can do to combat systemic racism and
to build a more just and inclusive society. My gratitude also to the office of the provost
and the Annenberg school for Communication for their support of this important lecture. The year
2020 was one of far too many deaths black and brown people died disproportionately our society,
suffered devastating setbacks and civic decency, attacks on voting rights and legal equality and
frontal assaults on the truth. If we breathed any sigh of relief when 2020 ended it was short-lived.
On a day dedicated to the peaceful transfer of power, the unholy ghosts of racism anti-semitism
and white supremacy reared their hideous heads. An attempted insurrection of our nation's
capital was fomented by none other than the president of the United States. His lips dripping
with the words of interposition and nullification. Truncheons and tear gas for black lives matter
protesters followed by selfies and salutes for insurrectionists. These dark times make us all the
more grateful to have Dr King's example as guide. We also lovingly recall our friend, the late
honorable John Lewis. He famously made good trouble. He urged us to work relentlessly towards a just
society. Dr. King taught us that lies and deceit, even bombs and bullets will not ultimately
stand in the way of a higher truth. We celebrate having the first vice president
of the United States who is a woman of African-American and Asian-American descent. This
historic first serves to underscore the chasm of injustice that still remains to be overcome.
We stand as one in affirming Dr King's legacy . To make our society more just, for truth to shine
brighter, we must be determined to make it so. Thank you all for joining us today for
a conversation about why race matters. We all extend the warmest welcome to Cornel West ,
whose intellectual gifts and generosity of spirit will help us to confront the most challenging
issues of our day. Greetings friends and welcome to our 2021 Martin Luther King Jr lecture on social
justice featuring the incomparable Cornel West. As a speaker he is always in high demand
and we're very fortunate to have him with us in conversation with Margo Crawford, director of
the Center for Africana Studies and professor of English. In this time of political social and
economic upheaval, when the pandemic's racial disparities continue to shock, if not surprise, it's
hard to imagine a thinker whose ideas have more salience and relevance than Mr. West. He has written
that "the lens of race becomes indispensable in our attempt to understand, preserve and
expand America's democratic experiment." While painfully accurate. and sadly still
relevant today, his observation was made more than 15 years ago in the preface to his
groundbreaking book Democracy Matters. In that book in his previous work race matters, Mr West
argues that the very idea of America can only be understood with racism and classism and
the resulting inequalities as definitional. As we've seen, our democratic experiment remains
fragile. Yet Mr West remains hopeful that from this difficult foundation something glorious
can still be created. The headwinds of 2020 have only served to reinforce Penn's
commitment to our definitional values: the pursuit of knowledge, to help build more equal,
more just and more global society. We recognize both our obligations and the challenges we face
and we remain undeterred. Thank you for joining us. Thank you President Gutmann and Provost Pritchett.
My name is John Jackson. I'm Walter H Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication
and Richard Perry university professor here at the University of Pennsylvania. It is an honor
for the Annenberg school to co-sponsor the annual Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr lecture in
social justice for the Center for Africana Studies. These events are always powerful, far-reaching,
critical discussions that help to set the tone for ongoing conversations we have on
campus and beyond, throughout the year. Given this year's speaker and his thoughtful take
on the most important issues that impact our lives and our ideas about social political possibility, I
have no doubt that this year's event will continue in that tradition of giving the Penn community
much to ponder and revisit as we take on the challenges of a relatively new calendar year. So
without further delay let me briefly introduce our guest and our campus host for the 2021
Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr lecture in social justice. And I'll begin with my
colleague and friend Margo Natalie Crawford. Professor Crawford is the Edmond J. and Louise
K. Khan professor for faculty excellence in the department of English and the director of
the Center for Africana Studies here at the University of Pennsylvania. Crossing boundaries
between African American literature, visual art and cultural movements, her scholarship opens up new
ways of understanding black radical imaginations. Crawford is the author of "Black Post Blackness: the
Black Arts Movement and 21st century Aesthetics," as well as "Dilution Anxiety in the
Black Phallus." She's the editor of "New Thoughts of the Black Arts Movement," and
also co-editor of "Global Black Consciousness." Her latest book is being published this
month after Kenneth Warren's "What was African-American Literature?" her forthcoming
book "What is African-American Literature?" pivots on an important shift of tense from was
to is to talk about African-American literary production. Her essays appear in a wide range of
books and journals including "American Literary History," "Modern drama," "American Literature,"
"The psychic hold of slavery," "The trouble with post blackness," "The modernist party," "Publishing
blackness: Textual constructions of race since 1850" 'The Cambridge companion to American poetry
post 1945," "Want to start a revolution?: Radical Women in Black freedom struggles," "Callaloo
Black Renaissance noir and "Black camera." Cornel West. Dr Cornel West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Dr
West graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and PhD in
philosophy at Princeton University. He has written 20 books and edited 13. He is best known for
his classics "Race Matters," and "Democracy Matters." For his memoir "Brother West: Loving and Living Out Loud." His most recent book "Black Prophetic Fire" offers an unflinching look at 19th and 20th
century African-American leaders and their visionary legacies. Dr West is also co-host along
with Dr Tricia Rose of "The Tightrope," which is a weekly podcast where they take time to welcome
listeners and guests as thought collaborators with revered hosts and public intellectuals.
Dr West is a frequent guest on "Bill Maher," CNN, C-SPAN and "Democracy Now." He has a passion to
communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
A legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. Without further
ado, professor West and professor Crawford. I would like to begin by thanking my dear
sister, president Amy Gutmann where many years at Princeton and her leadership continues
to flower and flourish. I want to salute brother Wendell Pritchett, as well as brother John Jackson
for allowing me to be here and first and foremost. I am blessed to be here with my dear sister
distinguished professor Margo Natalie Crawford whose work has meant so much to me on the black
arts movement, its connection to contemporary artistic visual literary expressions always subtle,
sophisticated, keeping track of the rich humanity of Black people, but also critical of anyone who
would impose closure, anybody who would talk about stop and to be in conversation with her as it
relates to the one and only Martin Luther King Jr and the tradition that produced him is a joy. To
say a last word about University of Pennsylvania, when i think of University of Pennsylvania
i think of giants like Houston Baker and Farrah Jasmine Griffin and Herman Beavers. I know
brother Michael Hanchard is here now. I knew him when he was a graduate student at Princeton. He's
a towering figure in political science, but the the formation of such scholars at University
of Pennsylvania, the old quaker site and institution, and having Black presence in this
context does make a difference and says everything about the tradition of a Black people spilling
over in a variety of different ways even in 2021. Thank you Dr Cornel West. I am truly
honored to be in conversation with you today and this annual event as you know is
named after Dr King. I want to start by thinking about your book "The Radical King." And you write
"does America have the capacity to hear and heed 'The Radical King' or must America sanitize
King in order to evade and avoid his challenge?" are we still evading this challenge of hearing
and heeding Dr King. Who is the radical king? I appreciate that question and I'm telling you,
a lot of different facets and aspects to it. But I think we have to begin with the notion
that Martin Luther King Jr is not an isolated voice, an icon in a museum. He's a wave in an
ocean that he is part and parcel of the tradition of a great people, a world historical people
whose gifts to the world are an unbelievable caravan of love in the language of Isley Brothers
in the face of 400 years of chronic hatred, of being wounded healers in the face of 400 years
of vicious trauma, and being freedom fighters at our best in the face of 400 vicious years of
terror. So that when we raise the question of who is King, who is the radical King we're really
saying how do we keep track of the best cacophony of voices that come out of a tradition of a hated
traumatized and terrorized people such that the love of truth and the condition of truth
is always to allow suffering to speak. The love of beauty in beauty itself is
a creative response to terror and trauma and the attempt to be wounded healers rather than
wounded hurters and therefore attempt to generate ways in which people can be enabled and empowered
even given the imperfections and the fallibility of those who are doing the healing. So for me to
think Martin King comes out of this tradition in the belly of a beast in the belly of white
supremacist slavery for 244 years and almost 100 years under the usm republic. Of jim crow and jane
crow, the belly of the beast. The spiritual decay and moral decrepitude of the American empire.
That's the worst. Now the best of course is the love of truth and goodness and beauty
in America as a whole, no matter what color. You always got the John Brown, the rabbi Abraham
Joshua Heschels, the Anne Bradens, the the grace Boggs folk, who are not Black in phenotype
and characterized as Black in America but who out of integrity, honesty, decency, choose a love for
truth and goodness and beauty to be in solidarity with Black people's struggle. So we look at America,
what do we have? What is spiritual decay? Spiritual decay is the relative eclipse of
integrity, honesty, and decency and it's replaced by an obsession with power, an obsession with wealth,
an obsession with superiority. So a vicious legacy of white supremacy is not an abstraction. It's
something on the ground that's very concrete that exploits black labor, that devalues
black bodies, that attacks black beauty, black intelligence, black moral character and
Martin King is part of a countervailing tradition, countervailing figures that are rooted in families,
rooted in communities, rooted in churches and mosques and temples and synagogues.
Rooted in sports connections, rooted in sonic confidence. I love that term from Rakim's
latest autobiography "Sweating the Technique." Sonic confidence so that the musicians
oftentimes will be the vanguard because they will engage and enact the love of truth and beauty
and goodness and some who are religious will even have a love of God, like myself, as a revolutionary
Christian. So that Martin King comes along then from Alberta and daddy King, no Martin
without his mama and his daddy, rich tradition, Atlanta, Georgia, he comes along product of
Morehouse College, the great Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman. He goes with Crozier, professor
Davis and others there at the seminary, PhD at Boston University. Writes on Paul Tillich and
Henry Nelson Weinman. All of these figures voice the love put in him, injected into his symbolic and
literal veins are then expressed in his own love for truth and beauty and goodness and in his case,
of God. So he is a particular Christian preacher called in such a way that he's willing to bear
witness to a truth and a justice and yet that same America, even given the progress of the movement
that he was a part of. And Fannie Lou Hamer always reminds us, Ella Baker especially, that the movement
made Martin as much as Martin made the movement. But coming out of that movement,
tremendous progress in terms of breaking the back of American apartheid. They did break the back of
legalized jim crow and that's that's a monumental move. But there's jim crow jr., there's
a new jim crow, the de facto jim crow. White supremacy adjusts itself to new
particular circumstances and conditions. of course the murder of brother Martin made it very
clear that there were strong forces of backlash even given some of the victory, some of
the successes of the Black freedom movement which is the species of the love of truth and the
love of of justice. And now you know when we look, my God, my dear sister you know, 50 something
years later you look at the spiritual decay. You got 58 percent of white brothers voted for neo-fascist gangster. 53% of white sisters did. 35% of latinos and one out of three asians. 31% of Jewish brothers and sisters to 28
percent of queers did. Only 14% before. 100% increase. Even our pressures queers, 28% vote
for neo-fascist gangster. This is a sign I think, of a very deep moral decrepitude and spiritual
decay in terms of people looking for a way out and and moving in xenophobic directions.
Moving in directions in which they are indifferent seemingly to the
suffering of the vulnerable. Especially of black folk in hoods and brown folk in
barrios, indigenous peoples on reservations and poor white folk locked into poverty-ridden
conditions. So I think Martin King would say with Garvey, that Garvey used to say as
long as the masses of Black people are in America they will live lives of relative ruin and
disaster. We got 52 percent of our young of all black people have no wealth at all
52 no wealth at all no savings whatsoever so effective wage stagnation an effective neglect
effective abandonment and yet of course the wealth accrued at the top has been overwhelming
unbelievable among the one percent and the 0.01 that's what would bring tears to brother martin's
eyes he said there's four major challenges lens to look at america racism militarism
poverty and materialism all four catastrophes militarism and imperial catastrophe africom
on the continent 800 military units around the world we got 4 800 in the whole world united
states china and russia together have 30. military giant dropping bombs afghanistan
pakistan drones and somalia drones and in yemen and so forth uh then you've got the
racism which we know is a moral catastrophe we've got the poverty which is an economic catastrophe
and we've got materialism which is a spiritual catastrophe thinking that somehow we can possess
our souls by means of possessing commodities thinking that somehow things and possessions
can actually be the source of deep meaning in one's life thinking that titillation and
stimulation have something to do with deep caring and nurturing or at least replace deep caring and
nurturing all of those different dimensions martin always connected the existential to the economic
the personal to the political as our feminists and women have taught us and the spiritual to the
social one last point martin luther king jr was an artist and we don't talk about him as much but he
was an artist and an artist is someone who looks at the world unflinchingly in all of his grimness
and his bleakness and steel musters the courage to give us some form it could
be sonic it could be paintings it could be sculpture it could be buildings it
could be a life it could be a way of touching it could be a way of loving that in powers
and enables us so as an orator artistic artistic as a leader trying to somehow deal with
all the conflicts between brother stokely and carmichael who he loved so deeply and stokely
loved him so deeply john lewis diane nash bob moses we can go on and on gloria richard all of
the groupings that he was wrestling with trying to orchestrate some kind of mediation of the
conflict that's artistic it's artistic and people downplay the role of the artistic when it comes
to politics they downplay the role of the artistic when it comes to leadership so martin's got
all of these going on and at the same time you know we talk about his legacy because he he
was too much for america his truth was too much and i think in 2020 those who are seriously trying
to be if not disciples or followers at least creative appropriators of martin i'd say the same
thing about malcolm i'd say the same thing about fannie lou hey any of those persons who choose to
work to work in their tradition and walk in their legacy the words would be much too much for the
dominant forces of america to come to terms with i think you anticipated dr west you anticipated
my next question but because in terms of malcolm x was malcolm x also too much for this world we
think about the radical malcolm x you know just as you're teaching us how to really remember the
radical king can you give us a glimpse of what we need to understand in terms of the radical
malcolm x oh i appreciate that question my dear sister and that's one reason why in the first
paragraph of the text that you were kind enough to show and invoke i talk about june 27 1964 when
malcolm x sends a note to martin luther king jr and says will you go to me to the united nations
to put america on trial for the violation of the human rights of black people and martin says yes
through clarence brother clarence jones his lawyer and of course it was so very difficult
for martin and malcolm to come together if i have i've got a number of criticisms of
martin luther king jr one of my criticisms i think he should have worked closer with malcolm
much earlier i think he was too afraid of malcolm x and we've got to recognize our tradition
is one in many we've always had a variety of different voices as long as it's a voice and
not an echo if you just echo somebody else's chain but you don't need to be it at the center of the
movement because you're going to get manipulated you're going to sell out soon but if you have your
own voice it means you have your own integrity you have your own sense of who you are so that
you won't sell out and we had deep many had deep disagreements with with mountains especially
early about white peoples and all that we say no i know they're not devilis do they have a lot
of devilish behavior hell yes but they're not devils so you see so we just agree with that
malcolm but he was free and he was speaking from his heart and he said what he meant he meant
what he said he wasn't posing and posturing like too many leaders today and martin and malcolm
should have worked together much more but martin was very very fearful of mar of malcolm my uncle
wasn't fearful of martin though he'd hunt him down he would have met him any second that's kind
of brother malcolm was so they go hand in hand you know james cohen's great book on martin and
malcolm go hand in hand and uh there's a new book of our brother who just went to uh texas what's
his name um he wrote him the book on stokely carmichael too you know who i'm talking about i
don't know why i can't remember his name now but that he that that's a good book too on martin
and malcolm but uh uh uh uh but they do go hand in hand it's not just those two but it's also a
snick you know it's also dying nash and it's also gloria richardson it's also the tim of clark it's
also stokely and john lewis and the others but i i think in in malcolm's case you know there's
a sense in which malcolm was freer than martin uh and by freer what i meant was that it's what
the greeks called parheezia p-a-r-r-h-e-s-i-a fearless speech frank speech an intimidated
speech a speech that comes so deep from your soul that you know you can get shot in a second
you don't care because the truth is more important than your life now martin had a whole lot of
that malcolm had more you see you see so that uh malcolm had a uh a militancy a consistent
constant militancy that martin was attenuating a bit i think it was inside of martin but he was
much more uh practical about how it expression i mean he was a socialist since he was 19 years
old but he didn't talk about being a socialist when he first met coretta coretta he said you
never met a black socialist have you corrected you said no i have met him right here in boston
so all those years he's a member you know in a collegiate society when he when he got the call to
uh uh win a nobel prize don't give it to me give it to norman thomas norman thomas who's normal
time well i wrote an essay i got it in the book radical king the bravest man i ever met norman
thomas head of the socialist party oh martin king bravest man socialist party you
don't want the nobel prize give it to a a white socialist we didn't know he was a
socialist i've been soldiers all my life we couldn't say it we understand that you
know we got to be improvisational now we're jazz people we have lose people now but uh
where's malcolm you see michael would have said i'm a follower of the honorable elijah muhammad
when he said this that's right that's what i believe well that's gonna give you two percent
approval in the country i don't give a goddamn i'm saying what i feel then when i change my mind
i'm breaking from an honorable elijah muhammad oh that's gonna get you killed maybe this is what
i believe you see that's kind of brother malcolm so it's a little different and we need both of
their spirits they're just not identical you know they're not it's not the same it's like
jeremiah right you have my right as the son of malcolm in the christian context uh and so he
speaks honestly candidly and so forth and so on he said god damn america based on what william
james said we have james said goddamn america based on its viral actions in the philippines
that's what he wrote in 1899 that's exactly what jeremiah wright was invoking when he gave that
speech but it gets out of context fact fox news gets it brother barack obama's got to sanitize
and sterilize and deodorize it in order to move into his presidency you know we understand
you got to be practical and things but jeremiah said i'm speaking from my heart does he come out
of malcolm x legacy within the christian church whereas some of us are much closer to martin
and myself i try to have a dialectical interplay between the two i really do uh but i mean
i'm going but i mean the question of uh of malcolm and martin is one in which they must
always be viewed in an interdependent inter uh a a a a related way and not just those
two but a whole host a cacophony of voices you know what i mean there's no such thing as a
great black voice being solely and isolated so low even luther vando's got to have lisa and him in
the background to make him sound as good as he you know what i mean no matter what you know what
is mary lou williams and all of her genius jerry allen and all of her genius without the other
voices what's duking count without the other voices what's james brown without the other
there's no such thing it's always a cacophony and we have to be very suspicious of the white
mainstream appropriation of these black folk and make them isolated individuals that they worship
and fetishize and don't want to be criticized in terms of them having to meet the standards
of the tradition that produced these folks absolutely so i want to say so in so many ways you
know what you're suggesting what you're reminding us in terms of the problem of that fetishizing
of the black soloists right that it makes us it makes us rehear what fred moden says when
he refers to the unalone soloists you know the innocent black soloist loan right that's a
powerful formulation promoting something else fred's something that's a powerful formulation
it's so much in the spirit of dr west of what you're emphasizing as well so for me when i think
about the radical king your book the radical king if i had to choose any sentence to hold on
to one sentence out of all of the sentences that you deliver it would be these following
words you write for king justice was what love looks like in public justice was what love
looks like in public can you tell us more about that very idea what you mean when you
say that justice is what love looks like in public because we talk so much about king in
love but in terms of the radical king i think even in that very formulation you're helping us
understand other dimensions of the radical love oh it's a wonderful question well one is you see
brother martin like myself uh decided to be a christian as a young person he got his religion
young the way dorothy love coach sings about it and it meant that he was willing to bank
his life on a profound insight that comes out of the genius of hebrew scripture
that says to be human is to spread hesit which is a loving kindness and a steadfast love to
the orphan the widow the fatherless the motherless the persecuted the subjugated and the exploited
but the conception of hesset is deeper in the conception of justice they go hand in hand so that
see justice is what love looks like in public just like tenderness is what love feels like in private
see that's like all this red and try a little tenderness that's baby face and by bobby brown
that tinder roni there's a tenderness a sweetness a kindness that is not reducible to just justice
reinhold never used to say any justice that's only justice soon degenerates into something less
than justice because justice itself can become an idol you see this among a lot of the uh the more
fashionable uh uh uh uh activists sometimes where they feel so good about themselves that they are
pursuing justice they're on the right side i'm somebody no that's self-righteous see a genuine
justice is motivated by a hesitant motivated by love because it's the care and concern for
the folk catching hell with the carry concern for those who are being persecuted subjugated
and because it's so overwhelming you can never feel good about yourself because the suffering
is too much and it's always more than we can fundamentally attack at the moment and it's been
so much more we don't have a language to describe but so there's a humility not a self-righteousness
that ought to go hand in hand with the struggle for justice and so it is about love the very
notion of a self-righteous love is a contradiction love is about vulnerability love is about
humility love's about learning how to die you got to kill something inside of
yourself the narcissism inside of you in order to open your heart and soul to somebody
else so that you are then empowered in all of your vulnerability with that other vulnerability the
other person's vulnerability so that part of the genius of black folk has been tied to the dreams
of hebrew scripture and tied to the genius of of palestinian jew named jesus is kenosis you
see that the highest form of being human is to learn how to empty yourself give yourself donate
yourself give your all whatever gifts you have to provide a way of of using those gifts to enable
others and therefore you get this notion of struggle see justice is not an abstract ideal it
is a force in the world it is a verb it's motion it's movement you've got this wonderful
formulation in your recent book called the instability of electricity i love that effective
energies unleashed like when tony morrison reads core that sticky this that pin in the gas
that you talk about with frederick douglass it's a powerful text you got but if you're part
of the same tradition you a wave just like mark and i got my little wave myself all of us are
waves in this great tradition some become more visible martin's more visible than most of us you
know but he was human just like everybody else and the question is you don't have an ocean
without the waves you got to have a whole lot of different ways and when love spills over
in public it becomes a force for justice john coltrane loves supreme becomes a force for
justice but it also tied to tenderness and tied to beauty become the force for beauty becomes
the force for the spirit becomes a force for good and in coltrane's language it's a force for god
now everybody don't believe in god you know james baldwin was agnostic with that brother that
jesus was from harlem he had so much god-like power inside of him that even when he
left the church in order to be more christian in order to be more loving one should
say that he recognized that there was something above his head and that last novel just above my
head there's some power up that i'm connected to because everybody's got to get some distance from
their narcissism and egoism and usually it has to do with a power outside of ourselves the love of
another an idea that lures us or whatever you see and so in that sense uh uh that's really
what i meant you know the moment when um martin has been in the paddy wagon four and
a half hour ride from atlanta to reedfield he's in there with a german shepherd in the dark
and the young told me this he and daddy king were waiting for martin when he got out martin looked
like he had a breakdown he could not hardly walk they had tears in their eyes and all martin
could say was this is the cross we must bear for the suffering of our people in our struggle
for freedom that's canosis that's what it means to give everything it's like cold train at temple
university in november 1966 playing so hard he throws the horn on the floor start beating his
chest rashida lee playing the drumstick train what you doing i'm trying to express something i'm
trying to empower and the horns getting in the way so he ain't fetishizing the saxophone
love supreme ain't about the sound and the saxophone is about what the sound is doing
to other people's souls other people's hearts other people's sense of possibility in the
world it's like if we professors we get so obsessed with our books obsessed with our titles
in our position no that ain't what it's about they are to be used as instruments and vehicles
to try to make the world better takuma alum and to touch souls and to allow our own souls to be
wrestled with in such a way that we can be healed so it's never just art for heart shaking they
abstract but it's never art reducible to politics either it's our tied to life and life is so
rich and so mysterious and so unpredictable like history and yet all of them go hand in hand the
political and the personal residential economic and the social and the uh uh the spiritual in that
way that's what martin king like so many of the figures that we wrestle with in our classes and so
on is such a crucial portal but we can't just get locked into him he's got to open us into the
richness of these black peoples who produced him and the other people's two but he's
primarily from the chocolate side of town he's primarily from the chocolate side of
american empire no doubt and then also try to examine something inside of ourselves you see
we don't want to escape from our own interiority in our own hearts and minds and souls in the
battlefield that's taking place on our own souls as well as the battlefield taking place in
america in the world and at this point you know what the planet about to go under given
all of this greed uh manipulating squeezing out a nature and environment that um we've got to
avoid self-destruction as a species and the only way you do that the species itself has to undergo
some kind of change and give up on some of that greed give up on some of that small-mindedness
and truncated vision as to how we make it uh in the next you know hundreds of years if
there be a planet around we just don't know yes so in the cornell west reader you write three
related and fundamental questions motivate my writings what does it mean to be human what does
it mean to be modern what does it mean to be american why these three focal points human
modern american this is you going back to 1999. we that's 22 years ago i appreciate that no very
much so well you see i begin with a a reality that is still news to a lot of people which is
that black people are full-fledged human beings who don't need to prove it to anybody something
presupposed and assumed uh and the alternative to that is black people are in perpetual audition
obsessed with the white normative gays concerned with white recognition and approval and if we
don't get that somehow we'll fake we are failures see those are the two alternatives so by
assuming african man in the modern world in the u.s version of the modern world and black
people are shaping and molding modernity shaping and molding the us version of
that as human beings with all of our hybridity all of our flexibility and that means
of course good and bad you know we got black thugs and got black gangsters and we got black saintly
people and we got black folk we're trying to be decent and i think there's always an intertwining
i know i got a lot of gangster and thug in me we won't get into at the moment but uh it's always
intertwined because that's what it is to be human but when you when you start that way it means
that black people can never be ghettoized in terms of any discourse about humanity in terms
of any discourse about modernity in terms of any discourse about the usa and to not be
ghettoized means and that you take a stand with your back strong understanding those who
have shaped you are allowing you to stand strong and then you express yourself intellectually
morally spiritually organizationally movement wise in terms of uh black freedom
struggles or you know feminist struggles or workers struggles or anti-homophobic or anti-trans
uh phobic struggles but that has to do with uh uh always understanding that one's identity has to be
rooted in a moral and spiritual integrity tied to an all-embracing solidarity for those who suffer
because if identity floats from integrity and solidarity then you end up with a class politics
from above and of course the great adolf reed who just retired from this grand institution has
taught us well that these narrow forms of identity politics become class politics and you end up with
a black bourgeoisie that break dances to the bank or break dances to martha's vineyard and you end
up with black poor and black working people locked into the most vicious form to decrepit education
indecent housing hardly any access to health care and unable to get jobs with a living wage and so
black success becomes measured by how the black professional class is doing black success becomes
measured measured by the icons of black celebrity rather than the rich humanity of the
least of these the rich humanity of black poor and working people oftentimes
whose revolt generated the opportunities for folk to become middle class i mean i got
to harvard because the vicious assassination of martin luther king jr took place and over 200
cities were burning and harvard decided well we only had uh seven negroes two years before
now we're going to admit 90. now there was no intellectual renaissance in the black community
that led toward that and the legislation had already taken place in 64-65 harvard didn't move
it was when the brothers and sisters on the ground out of a deep love for their beloved martin
who had been shot down like a dog in memphis the level was spilled it spilled over a righteous
indignation all across the country and then the white elite said oh my god we really got
a negro problem and they open harvard up and here come brother west and many others
of us and i said i'll never forget that that's my source of opening the door for me
i'll be true to that in my own way i ain't imitating anybody ain't emulating anybody i'm a
free black man i'm a jesus loving free black man but i'll never forget the conditions under
which my success was made possible what me folk on the ground you see and uh i think we've
got a problem these days because black uh freedom oftentimes is reduced to black success for the few
at the top rather than black greatness for every body and greatness has to do with the quality
of service to the least of these that's my biblical criteria that i learned in vacation bible
school we learned that shallow baptist church if the kingdom of god is within you that everywhere
you go you ought to leave a little heaven behind and the heaven you leave behind means you're going
to raise some hell in the name of folk who are coming to terms with nightmare's conditions it's
like following jesus into the temple where he ran out the money changes he ran them out that's why
he was crucified that's martin's message how many churches you know he got pictures of jesus running
out the money cheering the changes on the wall none whatsoever yet they won't talk about the
cross that's the cause of the crucifixion and who was in that money would and who
was that temple like one of the huge this side of rome that police on
one side it was a bank as well so you talk about wall street you talk about white
house pentagon harvard university of pennsylvania university chicago berkeley hollywood
critical of all of us in elite positions not because we are elites per se but because too
many are choosing indifference to the lives of the vulnerable elites can be forces for good too if
they so choose no and they must they must choose because otherwise dr west absolutely we must
choose because otherwise we become the elite who are speaking for the people on the ground right
and the nerve of us right actually uh positioning ourselves right to be that kind of me no i hear
yeah that's the way ella baker comes back now lift every voice which is the anthem of black
people means you've got to learn listen like a good blues woman or a jazz man learn and
listen find your voice and be part of the cacophony of voices you so choose always with a
critical sensibility now we're not talking about on critical deference we're not talking
about group think we're not talking about mob mentality we're talking about people
thinking for themselves which means we're always going to have disagreement but ellison
called antagonistic cooperation that's what a jazz orchestra is antagonistic cooper voices
bouncing off against different voices that's a crucial thing but integrity has to be at
the center of it see once you get identity talk without mourning spiritual integrity then it's
just a cover for gangster activity yes yes so you earlier as you were talking about the fact that we
really need to trouble that impulse to fetishize the black soloist as you brought in so many other
voices one of those names was indeed tony morrison and i know oh yes yes i want you to re-hear
some of the words you have um shared in terms of in terms of tony morrison and specifically dr
west and right there there she is right there yes indeed yes yes about what you have said about baby
sug sermon and beloved and i hope for everyone listening if you haven't read beloved read
beloved for so many reasons and in particular read beloved so that you can encounter baby sub sermon
and dr west writes in reference to this sermon you write one of the great moments in american
literature and you also described this sermon as one of the great moments in modern
literature dr west can you tell us i know that you are drawn to so many sermons what is it
about baby sub sermon what is it about that moment and beloved that you feel opens up so much i think
it is the literary embodiment of a love supreme not just cold trains love supreme but the love
supreme that coltrane himself was aspiring to and the love supreme that tony morrison was
aspiring to in that sense they become the grand love warriors of a great tradition of love
love warrior ring he said it reminds me of that line and sly stone uh sing a simple song he's got
larry graham thomas i'm living loving over loving what does it mean to overcome by over loving that
produces an overjoy that stevie wonder sings about and stevie's part of that same love warrior class
as as an artist you see that what tony morrison was able to do was to show the ways in which we
can use everything we got and sometimes all we got is our bodies all we got is what a scholar i know
called substance of style named professor margo natalie crawford and that substance of style has a
content to it that has a political dimension it's got a spiritual dimension it's got a moral
dimension it's got an economic dimension and baby sucks all she had was her body and
her brilliance and most importantly her heart her love and it overflowed she was over loving and
the people could not help but respond to that deep giving you remember you get the same line and
uh and uh ma rainey and the great sterling brown herman bieber's been talking about this and
his poetry and his criticism for a long time where he said what was about maureen i don't know
she had something that just got you grabbed you connected with something deep inside of you and
this is true at the human level you could be from ethiopia guatemala you could be from tel aviv
you can be from gaza you could be from moscow you're all human beings who get touched by
something when someone is overloving you and and and once that stickiness is unleashed
you start raising questions about yourself what was it what kind of human being am
i really that i can even feel that deeply because baby sucks is taking you to the lower
frequencies much deeper than ellison himself and ralph was already down there with the lower
frequency tony's even down there deeper and what's deep down there the funk yeah she ain't
faking that funk she ain't deodorizing that funk baby suggs is providing a moment of funk
and funk is all about the love supreme leaving the heaven behind but it's
socratic it's critical it's prophetic bearing witness to the vulnerable self-critical
but it's also and i love this work my dear brother kevin you talk about the sovereignty
of the quiet and brian foster as well there's a certain quietness too the role of silence
is the role of surrender which is different than resignation different than submission you
see you surrender it's like falling in love that's not a submission let's see that that's not
a uh uh a vicious form of obedience surrender is more subtle than that you see and baby sucks was
emptying herself surrender she's donating herself reminds me of the end of a james brown concert
that brother used to go for four and a half hours non-stop i must have seen him 25 times
and he would always in he would say i don't exist without you i'm an extension of you you're
an extension to me baby sucks saying the same thing he was saying anybody come here to hear a
song that we didn't play and the sister in the back would holler he didn't play soul power he
said hit it bootsy and play the song right there because he's there to serve the people after four
and a half hours he's still tired can hardly walk we playing that song because somebody came to hear
that song james cleveland just do the same thing in church aretha would do the same thing in church
reverend stevenson clark garner taylor carol and knight all the great preachers you come to give
and baby subs takes all of that rich tradition and enacts it and the genius and beyond genius
of tony morrison puts it on the page and it's prior to the 20th century we think we on the
cutting edge we better go back to baby suggs it learned something in the 19th century
those negroes had something going on they didn't have hip hop but oh they had a whole
lot popping inside of their souls under vicious conditions the u.s conditions of jim crow just
off the back of of of barbaric slavery you see but that that takes us again to this issue
of uh of moral and spiritual integrity and and solidarity and giving uh in the most
genuine sense of uh and you see the connection between kenosis this emptying and the kinesis
which is the motion to keep people in motion keep on pushing a genius from the west
side of chicago named curtis mayfield said that's martin king king is given everything
stay in motion it's also kinetic you see so that it's got to be you know uh flexible and moving
back and forth sometimes it's trickster like trying to dodge all the bullets and the white
supremacist bombardment coming at you and you know win the fight so you don't fight you don't
fight in a moment well you're not going to be as effective you got to choose you your battles
but know that when the battle does come you're ready you're fortified you fortified in order to
fructify you got your courage in place in order to generate your deeds your effects your consequences
and there's a crucial distinction between foliage and fruit you see a lot of people produce a
lot of foliage look at me look at me my success my status i'm the first so-and-so i'm the second
so-and-so i'm the successful one good for you what you gonna do with it if you don't do nothing
with it you got foilage but you ain't got no fruit and somewhere i read somewhere martin read by
your fruit you shall know them by your deeds by the risk you take by the cost that you're willing
to pay that's going to be the great ones you see and that's why we come back to martin and malcolm
and fanny lou and nina simone and gil scott herron and we can go on and on and on mary berry well
i haven't said a word about my dear sister mary university of pennsylvania
doesn't exist without her witness her courage her vision you know what by your fruit
you shall know them that's what martin reminds us as this grand exemplar of this great tradition of the world historical people named new world
africans negroes black people in the united states speaking of that fruit speaking about philosophy
sermons in motion you have written in terms of why you think popular culture and black popular
culture matters you have written i focus on popular culture because i focus on those areas
where black humanity is most powerfully expressed i love that notion and i agree with
you that black popular culture really may be that zone where our humanity may be
most powerfully expressed can you say more about why you feel that in terms of black studies
in terms of philosophy when you think about your positioning as a philosopher why we need
to care about black popular culture um that's a wonderful question i mean two reasons one is
that see i do believe following ellison that um black music especially jazz
but not solely jazz is a a high if not the highest expression of democratic
symbolic action finding one's voice bouncing that voice against others so that the voices can
shape the destiny of a group or a people and democracy is fundamentally about those kinds of
freedoms and voices in decision-making processes that shape how power operates in such a way that
everyday people ordinary people can live lives of decency and dignity and therefore when you think
of popular culture you're really talking about the ways in which the sparks of genius and talent
among everyday people can be unleashed such that they lift their voices and shaped their destiny
and others but it but it requires cultivation it requires education it requires maturation so
you have to grow up you can't just be childish always be childlike but you can't just be childish
you can't be egoistic narcissistic tribalistic you got to have something tied you have to be
tied to something bigger than yourself and the best of popular culture in the united
states is disproportionately black culture probably the greatest aristocratic criteria
of choosing the greatest artist takes place on wednesday nights at the apollo over the last
75 years we choose her divine sarah we choose him michael jack i mean the the aristocrats of the
uh cultural sphere in the united states musically disproportionately come out of those apollo like
moments where everyday black people are choosing billy eckstein he's the one who represents
a level of excellence and so forth and so uh popular culture is not about a
dumbing down it's not about a leveling down it's about ordinary people being recognized uh
uh in such a way that their genius and talent can play a role in shaping the destiny
of a culture of a people of a society but it's always through a critical filter i
mean you know again you never want to just fetishize the popular no no that can move in the
fastest direction with no criteria to measure up but you don't want to demonize
it either act as if there's no genius there there's no talent there no that's
that truncated elitism that is fearful of ordinary people's possibilities and and potentialities
ordinary people's talents and geniuses you see but you know it you know in the end it really
is about um whether in fact the american empire has the capacity to really respect the
masses of its poor and working peoples in in affirming their dignity because it could
be the case that the worst of america remains the dominant form and the worst of america is its
claim to innocence james bond said the innocence itself is a crime before you commit an act you
can't be authorizers of forms of barbaric slavery and jim crow and jane crow and be innocent america
is unique among empires in the whole world to deny its empire and believe that it's innocent f.o
mathis and the great literary critic used to say america seems to move from perceived innocence to
corruption without a mediating stage of maturity peter pan like don't want to grow up grown rich
grown powerful grown wealthy but hadn't grown up he's still too narcissistic still too ostrich
like head in the in the sand don't want to look at the barbaric conditions in the past and the
present evade it avoid it or live in the state of denial as the great joseph lara used to say
the 51st state of the united states folk living in a state of denial they don't want to see how
deep white supremacy cuts they don't want to see how deep male supremacy because they don't want
to come to terms with the predatory capitalism of whatever stage it is these days this wall street
senate used to be more in industrially senate don't want to come to terms with the empire and
the bombs dropped and the drones killing civilians and so on you see those are the kinds of questions
that brother martin king was willing to raise especially those last few years though my
sister breaking the silence nikki when he said a vietnamese baby has the same value as a
baby in mississippi or connecticut or california you see insane we got to organize all poor people
the way william barber and sister theo harris are doing today and no matter what color the
politician or no matter what color the elite happen to be if they're not in solidarity with
fighting against poverty militarism racism in all of its various forms that includes anti-jewish
that includes anti-era but that includes anti-palestinian that includes anti-whatever
ideology that loses sight of the humanity of people and if they're not coming to terms with
materialism king is going to be fighting against you not by himself because some of us going to
go down swinging in the name of king and co train and nina simone and curtis mayfield and
so many of the others who are part of that love train on that love train yeah so dr west
when we think about king's very words a riot is the language of the unheard you and i know these
words gained a renewed force during the protest of george floyd's murder and i was delighted to
hear that and i also thought wait people need to pause and really think about those words a
riot is the language of the unheard what dr west remains in your estimation unheard right now if
you had as we end today if you had to think about some of the issues some of the uh ways that we
need to think about freedom struggles in terms of perhaps what remains illegible what remains
unheard what would you emphasize as we end today well i would say that uh that what is too often
unheard is the massive suffering and hurting of those folks who are expressing themselves in the
form of these rebellions i applaud the marvelous militancy of the largest expression of protests
in the history of the united states this summer that when our dear brother george
floyd jr is publicly lynched and to see the response all around the country and the world
and what we needed to do and we continue to have to do is that anytime you have arbitrary
power deployed in order to murder or maim or violate the dignity and rights of others
voices ought to be raised when you have something like that a public lynching especially on
on media on the media then it generates mass demonstration but the real challenge is
is that we you can't view it in an isolated way there's a connection between police power
pentagon power wall street power and when when king was talking about the relation of militarism
the bombs dropped in vietnam land in ghettos in the united states at 53 cent for every dollar
that goes to the military-industrial complex we got so much money left for education health
care housing and jobs with a living wage and so forth so that the militarism is tied as well to
the inability to come to terms with the poverty and then you've got the white supremacy and
the male supremacy and other forms of devaluing other peoples of color or sexual orientation
whatever you see so that uh what we need again is our identities grounded in these moral and
spiritual integrities that take take the form of all embracing solidarities with those friends
for no one called the wretched of the earth they've got it got to be connection between
that local and the global i know you've got a wonderful chapter on the local and the global
in in one of your texts it's hard to keep track of all your texts you know that you are a little
fake i'm telling you but but uh but but the local and the global go hand in hand as well as a
regional you see but all forms of particularity no matter how deep you dig in the roots have
to in the end be connected to a universality so that the routes that you take in terms
of how you see how you feel and how you act embraces people here and around the world we
can't be narrow and parochial can't be tribalistic and i think what martin would want us to say and
this is something that's so very crucial martin used to say in the end he said you know the sad
thing is is that uh people never understood me isn't that something when he was shot 72 percent
of americans disapproved of him over 50 percent of black people disapproved of it people forget about
that new york times said he was just an echo of communist hanoi because of his stand against the
war with rabbi hechel and the others you see black folk was saying why you talking about foreign
policy we're just talking about civil rights why are you talking about the poor we don't need
to talk about white poor we need to talk about brown poor we're talking about black people
and martin says y'all never understood me see i was never just a civil rights
activist i was never just a patriot i am a christian preacher who's called to follow hessed
pursue justice and tell the truth that affects every corner of the globe beginning with black
people in the united states so i'm not going to love everybody but black people that's sick that's
pathological you love the folk you grew up with and they give you the power through their love
to love everybody and he even loved his enemies which i also pursue but you need a whole lot
of grace for that don't try that on your own but the crucial thing is is that he made
the connections of local regional global of poor working people here and around the world
and so that every flag was under the cross and that cross signifies unarmed
truth and unapologetic love and that's the standard you can even be
secular you can be agnostic and say yeah i'm in i'm i'm into the truth and love now martin say
fine but i got my cross that's what that cross signify because that's where the kenosis takes
place that's what the giving the emptying the sacrificing the willingness to give your all to
the cause that you are called to that's martin king that's why he said at the end with tears
in his eyes folk never really understood me so i know every january they gonna sanitize me they
gonna sterilize me they're gonna make me into just an american patriot they're gonna turn me
into santa claus as if i was just somebody walking around with a smile with a whole lot of t toys in
the bag and can't wait to give out the toys and make everybody smile a lot of the white mainstream
gonna love me because yes i did try to love black folk but they don't understand when i went to
jail over 35 times i went to jail for black people but that love for Black people didn't stop me from
loving White people, from loving Jewish people, from loving Palestinian people, from loving Arab people,
from loving Asians, indigenous peoples and so forth. That's the love supreme that's always too much
for the ears of the elites, too much for them to really listen to and understand the challenge,
the fundamental challenge to the powers that be and that's why we shall never ever forget
our brother Martin and all of the others who gave so much in their own imperfect infallible
but magnificent, and i would say sublime ways. No Martin without Mahalia Jackson's
sublime singing her song of precious love. Thomas Dorsey, Pilgrim's Baptist Church in Chicago
when his baby and his wife die at the same time and he shifts from writing for Ma Rainey to
now Reverend Julius Caesar Austin the pastor of Pilgrims Baptist Church in Chicago and writes
that Precious Lord, that song, the favorite of Martin Luther King Jr. That's the song that got
him out of bed sometimes he couldn't even get out of bed. Andrew Young says he'd have to call Mahalia to sing the song to get out. That's the kind of brother we talking about. Up, down, depressed
but never completely destroyed. He gets up and he takes the stand, he loves, he speaks, he
sacrifices, he lives. Coretta standing by his side, strong as ever, brilliant as ever. Progressive,
much more progressive on homophobia than him. We got to push Martin on homophobia. Coretta's
already there. Coretta beat him on the war question. She opposed the war before he did. Pushed him along
with Stokely and rabbi Heschel and the others . But this Martin in all of his humanity, given
all of his ups and all of his downs, his sexism too i mean you can't be a black man
in America not have some deep sexist elements you got to wrestle with and try to push out to the
best of your ability. Same is true of homophobia. So he's not a perfect man, but oh what a
grand exemplar even given his imperfections. That's what we've come to acknowledge,
to applaud and most important to unleash in the hearts and souls of those
who are here to try to build on that. Thank you Dr Cornel West for taking us higher.
Thank you Dr Cornel West for this visionary jam session for social justice. As we end today,
I want to read the words that appear on the award that Dr Cornel West will receive from
University of Pennsylvania's Center for Africana Studies - you're giving me an award, oh lord, I'm not worthy of no
awards, good God almighty- and i want to share as we end today the words on that appear on this this gift. The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr lecture and social justice award is presented to
Dr Cornel West for your tireless dedication and unyielding commitment to social justice. January 27,
2021, University of Pennsylvania. And then the final inscription these words stated by Dr Martin
Luther King, "the moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice." Dr Cornel West, thank
you for your tremendous work. I thank you and I salute you. I'm giving you a big hug my dear sister. Thank
you so much for all of your magnificent work. Absolutely.
