A Conversation with Cornel West

good evening hello and welcome to Wake Forest I am Ann Phelps the director of programming and Leadership and character here at Wake Forest thank you all so much for coming out to this wonderful event with our distinguished guest Dr Cornell West first of all I want to thank our many co-sponsors from across the university for this event 28 in all which is to say too many to make you listen to by name but please know that we are so grateful for your partnership and support without which we absolutely could not do any of this week's events this conversation actually kicks off our educating character across the University conference which is being presented by the program for leadership and character here at Wake Forest as well as the Oxford character project at Oxford University if you have registered for the conference you should have received an email from us detailing where to go tonight tomorrow and Saturday based on the sessions for which you have registered if you did not register for a conference don't worry you're still in the right place this program is excited and proud to bring you this and other events to campus and Beyond in our mission to not only provide Innovative teaching creative programming and Cutting Edge research here at Wake Forest but also to catalyze a broader public conversation that places character at the center of leadership if this phrase sounds familiar particularly for some of the students that I make recited at the beginning of every semester it's possible that you have heard it in our mission statement and speaking of students if you are a student and you are here please raise your hand wow awesome I especially want to thank you on the brink of finals for coming out tonight which is just a testament to how wonderful it is to have the Cornell bust here you can read more of this mission statement and learn more about what we do in the program and Who We Are by heading over to leadership and character.wfu.edu and now to introduce tonight's speakers I want to turn it over to our Dean at the school of divinity here at Wake Forest the presidential chair in religion and society and the dean of weight Chapel Dr Jonathan Walton thank you [Applause] good evening so I've been asked to introduce tonight's speaker okay [Music] it's kind of hard to introduce somebody whom you already know you know him many of you had the pleasure last year when he graced this lectern [Music] yet as is true of grand intellects and extraordinary artists this gospel Blues philosopher and Jazz man in the life of the Mind always leaves us wanting more so when considering the ideal educator the ideal scholar to kick off this educating character across the University conference leadership and character understood that fear or few others that would be as engaging and as appropriate as this evening's guest Dr Cornell West when it comes to the scholarly Enterprise there are few grand intellectuals whose work shaped several Fields across multiple Generations one might think of W.E.B Du Bois Flannery O'Connor Reinhold nieber or Tony Morrison well over the past four decades the Corpus of Cornell West clears this incredibly High bar a capacious thinker a prolific author he has penned 22 books and has infused the culture with a clear and consistent message best summed up in the powerful parable of Jesus in Matthew 25. we will ultimately be judged by how we treat the most vulnerable the violated and the victimized Among Us and so it is this his philosophical approach in his moral character it's certainly informed by the progressive strand of Afro Protestant Christianity but it's not exclusive to a particular faith his work Bears witness and challenges those of us who might otherwise be blinded even by Protestant privilege for his version of progressive and prophetic Christian witness must be willing to reach across socially and intellectually constructed barriers tribes ideologies and uncritical commitment to any Doctrine or Dogma amount to crass idolatry particularly when it blinds us to human suffering racial religious or national identity cannot Trump moral affinity for Professor West nor ought class gender expression sexuality and or any other social construct delimit or over determine human personality this is who he is each of us he encourages us consistently has a moral responsibility to see and affirm the Divine in each other namely those that are cultural patents and social structures have rendered invisible you know him his genius is undeniable his influence is unmistakable his grace and gravitas are infectious and his moral commitments are incontestable they are as consistent as his black three-piece suit and his afro pick you know him and because you know him I don't need to introduce him I can just present him Dr Cornell West [Applause] well thank you Dean Walton for that prophetic introduction and thank you all for being here to this wonderful night to see the one and only Dr Cornell West I'm Michael Lamb I direct the program for leadership and character here at Wake Forest and Dr Westwood my teachers in graduate school and he inspired me then as he does now with his expansive intellect his tenacious passion for justice and his deep commitment deep commitment to living an ethical life so Cornell welcome back to Wake Forest uh dear brother it is my blessing and honor to be a part of your program your conference and first is Introduction by this president now a Princeton Theological Seminary oh yes oh yes no indeed indeed those words mean much but to be in conversation with with you my dear brothers is a blessing we have some precious memories there in Princeton with Jeff Stout and the others and this brother had just written in the magisterial text called The Commonwealth of Hope by the great African father Saint Augustine wrestling with how you get Beyond presumption and despair and provide some zone of mature hope grounded in piety and humility this is a timely text not an advertisement but a truth-telling connected to how you wrestle with leadership and character so we salute let's salute our dear brother here thank you no it's true though brother thank you it's a magisterial text oh thank you well puts a smile on Peter Brown's face and he's our dear brother correspondent well tonight is a night to talk about Hope and character and many other topics and um it is a and I talk about kind of how our characters are formed and so now maybe to get this started can you share more about your own formation of character their influences your own life growing up or maybe ways in which as a student or Professor you were shaped in the university to be a person of character well I appreciate the question don't mean one is that we all are unique and singular and so we all have our own distinctive pilgrimages and and Journeys and mine is one Beyond blessedness because of anybody has ever had chance to meet my mother Irene B West of Clifton West you would see that I am a thorough going failure in terms of the moral and spiritual standards of excellence of what the Greeks were called at the highest level and I'm not saying they're pure impressed Dean but they had levels of integrity and honesty and decency that I don't come close to and I didn't ask for that that's Grace I just showed up I was conceived in Texas and born in Oklahoma but we won't go into the process I was just born right there in Tulsa Oklahoma the same hospital as a Gap Band and Wilson Brothers Uncle Charlie and Company and for me then to think well how can I build on that rich tradition because I'm just a moment in that tradition you could say the same thing about Ken and Angela [Music] Integrity honesty and how does the brother of vanilla brother from Tennessee go to Rhodes College in the road scholar then PhD Princeton and now at Wake Forest you know somebody was praying for him somebody been praying for me too and most importantly it means then that whatever our stories are I would hope that given all of the overwhelming pessimism and cynicism and nihilism and despair and despondency that we all understandably and unflinchingly have to wrestle with we ought to begin with the note of revolutionary piety and by piety I mean what just out George Santana and others acknowledging virtuously the sources of good in our own pilgrimage from our Mama's womb to tomb what are the things that have helped us sustain persist and persevere or as Clara Ward Put in 1951 my soul looks back in wonders how I got over what has gone into the shaping and molding of Who We Are each and every one of us we are who we are because somebody loved us somebody cared for us somebody shaped us and molded us and it's and that cuts the cross a variety of different lines you see Richard Rory means much to me vanilla brother John Coltrane I take a bullet for born right down the street never met him but he's my soul mate he's chocolate yes but I don't love him because he's chocolate I love him because he's a chocolate loving artist who gave of himself and therefore he constitutes part of the wind at my back that's revolutionary piety being in contact with the things that are sources of good for you that lead you to be in the world but not of that world or at least try to be connected to the best of the world the Integrity honesty decency Vision courage justice as opposed to what Howard Thurman the great towering figure who taught Brother Martin King the hounds of Hell which are hatred and greed and cowardliness and hypocrisy and envy and resentment and they reside in each and every one of us and it's part of the battlefield of our own Souls where we engage in that contestation and struggle to see what kind of character we would have so then maybe then we can become lovers of Truth and goodness and beauty and Christian like myself of the holy of God and therefore even talk about leadership because as you know I'm very suspicious of that very category of leadership has been so bastardized in the last 50 years or so by the market and by spectacle and by power and talk solely about interest not enough talk about what it means to be a States person a Statesman a States woman who's committed to not just public good and public life but believes in personal Integrity as opposed to just cheap superficial popularity cut against that grain and of course it means then this is what I learned most from not just Mom and Dad but uh Willie P cook my pastor Shiloh Baptist Church he was a great man I'd never be as great as he was courage that's the enabling virtue of all the other virtues all the other virtues they empty and vacuous if you don't have courage and Plato's right in the lock case courage is a species of wisdom it's not rash Ness it's not recklessness it's not just superficial fearlessness save that for Hollywood courage is a form of wisdom that allows you to see things more clearly and feel more deeply and hear more closely so that you can act more courageously they all go together though the unity of the virtues that constitute a certain kind of High character so that when it's time to lead the real content of that leadership is the love the Courage the vision the Prudence the practical wisdom the prudentia as the Latins used to call it uh today is just too often opportunism next election interest group politics manipulation obsessed with depressed polarization and of course it results in what we have today which is gangsterization with escalating neo-fascisms here and around the world and whether we pass on to the younger generation then in terms of the great examples of character so that they can actually believe that great characters are not isolated icons in a museum that they could go to during some field trip in high school and say no when I see Malcolm X when I see Rabbi hesho when I see it with zaeed when I see miles Horton they're vital persons and a vibrant tradition that I am a part of that's very different I saw Christian McBride last night at the Village Vanguard up there looking like Charles Mingus on his double bass and he does what he knows that the Jazz figures that he invokes are not isolated individuals detached from him they're part of the same flow the same tradition the same Heritage the same Legacy but he's got to be an innovator and a caretaker of it the same would be true for your Siri X when he hears Tupac don't imitate Tupac he's a giant in the tradition you build on him and find your voice you come from a black people whose very Anthem is Lift Every Voice not lift every Echo you don't want to be a echo Who Wants to Be an extension of an echo chamber an echo of another Silo an echo of another interest group after of another narrowly defined slice no find your voice to where Aretha did in the way Billy Holiday did the way Billy X Stein we ain't got the Luther Vandross yet finding their voices and the only way you find your voice is to wrestle with the night side in your own soul the only way you do it William Butler Yates is right when he says it takes more courage to dig deep into the dark corners of their own soul and wrestle with who you are that it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield that's our Irish Blues Brother William Butler yes he's right and then the question becomes what are the conditions under which we can facilitate the Courage the Integrity the honesty the decency where will young people find it they come to the university is it too corporatized is it too Market driven is it too polarized where are they going to find the exemplars Kant says examples of the go-kart of judgment and the critique of pure reason he's right he's not always right he's right in that sentence examples of the go-kart of judgment where do you find the exemplars but he find it in the music do they find it in sports will they find it in the churches thank God for William Barber I know I'm in North Carolina well father and son father and son towering figures Grand examples and they're not the only ones there's others as well this is Brother Johnson in Greensboro and who took Johnson's church over he's a young brother brother Wesley he's my student oh I love that brother so much yes yes yes tell him I said hello he's another great example younger generation but he had to spend time around other people who were trying to cultivate character in order to do it he had to have concrete examples I can't stand this talk these days about abstract Role Models Who's Your Role Model Who's Your Role Model Oprah's my room my role model she's not your role model you don't know her she don't know you she can be a source of inspiration with her entrepreneurial genius she's not an example of political courage but that's another lecture I love my sister I'm gonna tell the truth about her but an example of somebody you're connected with you relate you see what I mean yeah and research now suggests that's true actually that we can see that it's concrete examples that make the most impact on us so we've got empirical data on what I'm saying during empirical data see look at there [Laughter] isn't that nice well Cornell you mentioned um Reverend Barber and your own sort of what you think about courage and integrity in public life and you're one of the most influential activists and Scholars of of issues related to racial Justice how can a critically informed account of character of Courage of Integrity inform our efforts to promote and secure racial Justice and equality and are there certain virtues you would recommend as being essential to that to that struggle well I mean one is just trying to be more like Fannie Lou Hamer hmm trying to be more like Ella Baker trying to be more like Martin uh and that that goes far beyond you know any talk about race skin pigmentation and so forth so we're at a point now in the culture where we're so polarized that it's people think about whiteness and they pick up people people are stuck in whiteness so you can't account for Miles Horton you can't account for Anne Braden can't he counts with John Brown the candy Council Rabbi Hester candy couch for all of those white brothers sisters that went against the white supremacy and there's a tradition of it it's not a mass movement but it's a very important tradition you see but the same is true is black you can get locked into blackness so you end up rightly talking about how beautiful Clarence Thomas is he is beautiful aesthetically ideologically spiritually morally dot dot dot you see so Blackness is not gonna take you too far you got black magnificent brothers and sisters you got black gangsters and thugs in every magnificent black person has a thug in him Tupac is right you got a gangsta element in him Augustine is right he's right same is true with yellow to these categories are so abstract and these labels they float all around in such a way they create various prisons in which actual human beings get locked in that doesn't allow them to unleash their potential for good and so with Martin one of the best examples of this is Brother Jonathan's book Lens of Love he's not just the president he's a major scholar on this lens of love if you're a serious love boy and freedom fighter and joy spreader and wounded healer then you go on Far Beyond gender class Nation skin pigmentation it's about spiritual formation moral cultivation and moral action that is the litmus Touch by your fruits you shall know them somewhere I read it doesn't say by your foilage we got a whole culture obsessed with foliage by your spectacle by your posing by your posturing by your move by your career by your position by your hey that's exactly what spiritual Decay is trying to allow the semblances and resemblances to somehow displaced with Ashford and Simpson would call the real thing and the real thing is always messy funky mix complex and complicated because it's human I love the motto for this institution absolutely Humanity that's right did they really know what they meant when they said before because if you're for Humanity you for the deep deep Funk and deep deep love because that's where you find the love in the fog you never find love in a deodorized space you don't word made flesh it's not just biblical it's a psychic truth human it's Dante earthy grotesque Visionary ugly star each Texans on the star in the gutter looking at the star yes that's the human for human most of us are fearful of wrestling with our humanity and we rather Escape in the narrow labels and categories and the mannequin views of I got all the good they've got all the bad I've got all the positive they got all the negative and it is a human thing it's inside all of us and that's why not just education but spiritual formation because so much of Education can be miseducation and just reinforce forms of learned ignorance and learn it bigotry and so in that sense you know we need each other's voices and that's exactly what you all do how old is your program now my brother we're here six years it's been six six years it went for us yeah and it's been really great to have so many people engaged in this program from around the university now from around the country now the world too well we have great Partners around around the world and what we've been thinking about a lot is how do you actually engage these questions of difference and you mentioned polarization now you've been doing a lot of work the last few years of your friend Robbie George colleague from Princeton yeah brother rob you know he's been sick though we got pregnant I didn't know that yeah no he's bouncing back though okay good yeah just talked to him just yesterday he's in the hospital but we had prayer he's he's holding them he's holding them good well you have a deep friendship with with Professor George what about friendship is the Brotherhood Brotherhood yeah it doesn't cut deep enough yeah yeah and so and so what what um what role does brotherhood play in helping us navigate friendship Brotherhood Sisterhood navigating these differences and living out the kind of love you describe how do you think about the world of friendship and especially friendship with those who are very different from us yeah and are there any limits on who we can be friends with well you can only get in so many at a time you say in one lifetime very very much so uh but you know it's hard to say you know friendships and brotherhoods and things I mean the kind of thing me and Jonathan had we don't have no language for what do we we don't have a language but we sing a song it breaks the back of words you know what I mean uh we break bread at this place later on tonight and start singing and things that we're in a zone that is majestic and Sublime even even as it remains funky and on the Earth and so I I don't think there's a formula or an algorithm or a general theory here it's just a way of learning how to open yourself be vulnerable to pour yourself into others and allow yourself to for them to pour into you Revel in their Humanity so you have to find certain things that are similar I mean brother Robbie and I we teach together we you know he's very much a Thomas Catholic I'm a kierkega guardian hanging loose left wing cognac drinking Baptist you know so you know we got a lot of different differences that we have but we love you know the Quest for truth we love argument we love conversation and we fight I like cats and dogs over certain political issues but we have very deep disagreements about some of these things it's just that the love is deeper than the disagreement and that's ought to be true I think of any any deep Brotherhood of friendship I've got a lot of friends like some of my black folk I got black nationalists brothers and sisters who others people of people are thinking why you spend time with black Nationals don't you think nationalism is too often an idolatry that gets in the way of keeping track of humanity of people outside National boundaries yes I do I believe that every flag is under the cross every flag is under unarmed truth and unconditional love the nationalism is very dangerous and you these days use monopolized in very ugly Ways by right wings and Neil fascists but at the same time there's aspects and elements of people's Humanity that you still Revel in even when you disagree with them they could be black they could be brown they could be white Jewish Arab Muslim or what have you you see uh but each one of us again have our own Journeys and so our testimony is going to be very very different I don't think there's a kind of general theory the important thing again is is example though it's example um you know the tocqueville is right when he said that one of the dangers of American democracy is given all of its talk about individualism it's addicted to conformity and it's grounded in a deep loneliness a sense of isolation and alienation I'm going to chapter why Americans are so Restless in the midst of prosperity now this is the French aristocratic brother in the 1830s and he comes to America and he sees these people they're full of so much energy and vitality and unbelievable vibrancy with these Civic associations and these voluntary affiliations but in the end they're so lonely because they're fearful of cultivating the capacity of genuine vulnerability and intimacy which means like Hamlet it was the greatest Western literary protagonist of the western world with our dear brother Shakespeare Hamlet suffers from the in capacity to love I think Harold Bloom's right about that Bloom's not right about everything he's right about that you see the incapacity to love in the American Hamlet has the same problem the American Hamlet is Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire my Tennessee Williams living on the surface in mind fearful of genuine Community relationship and therefore manipulating lust domination on the surface throughout life resulting in what very much what we have now in American culture which is a culture more and more of a joyless quest for insatiable pleasures you can get every possible pleasure in the world for titillation and stimulation but still have your soul empty and your heart vacuous because there's no joy there and joy is qualitatively different than the Deep but joy is qualitatively different than the superficial pleasure and the tofu could already see it Thornton Wilder's lectures on American loneliness show this David reesman's great book on the lonely crowd tease this out and it's it's something that one would have thought especially Tony Morrison's work uh one would have thought that black folk would have stronger buffers against given the barbaric slavery and the vicious lynching and American terrorism of Jim Crow which are the foundation so much of the American white mainstream up until the last 70 years or so and yet more and more we find black people commodified marketized deeply shaped by markets orientation the titillation stimulation spectacle narrow success when their great great grandmothers and grandfathers who may have been materially unsuccessful because they had no money were spiritually rich because they had a spiritual greatness that led them to still love their precious kids and sustain their churches and their barbershops and beauty salons and baseball leagues and and musical connections so that it would generate unbelievable World historical forces that would reshape the Sonic life of the whole globe the cultural ways of life and cultural modes of engaging the world deeply blackenized and afro-americanized coming out of those great great grandmothers and great-great-great-grandfathers who kept that love train going in the midst of the catastrophe of American Supremacy and so the question then becomes younger Generations best of the depression students not just to Wake Forest but other places The crucial question of Raisin in the Sun that genius from the south side of Chicago Lorraine hands Barry and she wrote it in her 20s and you all remember that play never been a figure with more love and in the history of the American Stage than mama and her question is Walter what you gonna pass on to Travis what you gonna pass on to your child your father died we looking for his money in order to get out of this Hood not because we want to live with white folks because we want to live wherever we want to live it's a freedom move it's not a matter of being assimilated and co-opted you live where you want to live but teach Travis something what you gonna do Walter we used to talk about Freedom now it's all money money money money money Bling Bling Bling Bling Bling cream cash rules everything around me but don't have to rule me surround me as the genius of Wu-Tang that's the genius of Wu-Tang now they might be from Staten Island and we don't expect too much out of Staten Island well you know that they're not from Brooklyn and Harlem that's all right those Geniuses got something to say as voices in a larger tradition of a great people that says in the face of all this hatred the love will still flow in the face of all of this care the freedom was still flowing in the hatred of all that is trauma the healing will steal flow oh what a people that are best and in the end if America doesn't understand that now that it has the blues wrestling with its own more and more lack of leadership and character if you don't lose learn something from a blues people you're gonna lose everything lose your democracy lose your rights lose your Liberty maybe even lose your whole planet because of organized greed at the top that doesn't want to come to terms with what nature as a thou is as opposed to Nature as a yet to manipulate so we learn from each other from Augustine from Plato from Shakespeare from Tony Morrison you see the Chavez Carlos Santana and a whole lot from John Coltrane absolutely well you do mention the Arts and at Wake Forest we do a lot of work here uh in the Arts the thing about theater dance poetry literature visual art as ways to understand and inhabit various forms of character and you an artist yourself uh well I wouldn't I wouldn't say that I think we all would say that with your uh Aspire too yeah well I think you live the hardest way here and so what what role has Arts played in your own formation of character and what role can they play in the formation of character in our Civic life oh yeah no for me that um music is probably the most constitutive feature in my life other than family and Jesus now you remember Martin Luther himself said the two greatest gifts of God was music and the word of God that's Martin Luther now he's got some vicious things to say about our precious Jewish brothers and sisters he's got vicious things to say about peasants but he spoke some truth spoke some truth and I think one of the reasons why he was so preoccupied with music and of course he's a musician himself he wrote A Mighty Fortress Is Our God itself he democratizes singing within the ritual of the church he allowed for the congregation to sing as a whole rather than just the choirs that was a very important move in the 1500s and black folk would take it and just take it to a whole level he knew not up but it's very important black folks are proud touch sons in that sense the African appropriation of that particular strand within a europeanized Christianity that did not begin in Europe very important to keep in mind Jesus does not look like Michelangelo's Uncle it's very important just a matter of Truth just a matter of Truth you see so that for me music is constitutive you know that I grew up singing maybe sometimes oftentimes Out Of Tune but I grew up singing sound like Marvin Gaye in the shower in the church on the Block James Brown is Bootsy is George Clinton is about Donnie half today is the emotions it's Ashford and Simpson and that's just the beginning of it I don't exist without them I can't preserve my sanity without them and I only in my right mind four days out of the week anyway and so that music is constitutive unfortunately again given our differentiated fears in our culture you got art in one corner ethics in another Corner science and another corner it's science ethics almost like the contrast text you know the first critiques got science and the new physics and then you got ethics gotta save a little room for God and freedom and immortality then you go oh my God we got the R-12 that's kind of objective but not really objective it's Collective but not really true what about religion that's religion within the limits of reason alone maybe certain feelings Oceanic feelings would fit in to become part of the new modern world view no no no no no that's never been my story at all at all my history my conception of who I am begins with moans and groans and cries that's why Socrates never sheds a tear I'm impressed but his intellectual Integrity spiritually underdeveloped [Laughter] because anybody who's never shed a tears never loved anybody um and no matter how smart people are but they never loved anybody I'm not deeply impressed um Grandma may not have read Socrates but she loved me she loved Cliff she loves Cynthia she loves Cheryl she loved folk in her church she loved all those little precious Black Folk who came to Vacation Bible scooter she taught over and over again and passed it on to my mama that kind of witness has to do with concrete Love Now Socrates is not pushed out we need Socrates but he's necessary not sufficient he doesn't cut deep enough Jesus Weeps oh that's different that's different our Jewish brothers and sisters begin Hebrews scripture with what cries of affliction and when you start with cries in the face of catastrophe then how do you deal with a reality that is so overwhelming that you know language is inadequate you know you don't have a solution for it somebody sing a song um 1837. Philadelphia first time black people come together as a public Henry Highland Garnett walks up got one leg leaning on a crutch and said I want to tell you black folks something you never forget he said our situation is not that of the Israelites in the Christian Old Testament for us Pharaoh is on both sides of the bloody Red Sea that's Henry Highland Garnett and it got silent the cricket and somebody in the backseat could somebody sing a song please but we laugh now to keep from crying we in the situation now somebody gotta sing a song to encounter encourage us Inspire us keep us moving the Kinesis of the cairos connected to the kenosis that meaningful moments that allow us to push Kronos back so that we can keep persevering in order to maybe give enough of ourselves for a breakthrough that's the history of any oppressed people's struggle that's the history of the species that's why Vico is right you begin with burial and the court says it's not Heidi Gary and talk about abstract possibilities of Love somewhere down of death somewhere down the line you begin with corpses that's Vico and what do you do with those corpses Rico said silence first then moans then groans than a song than poetry later on philosophy later on science ooh our Italian counterclastic Catholic brother vika he's on to something deep here he's on to something deep and it's and I think you know within the academy you can imagine you know this has tremendous implications in terms of uh the various schools of thought that that that that that circulate and travel uh the the concrete experience in time and space and it's one of the reasons why the artists of the last 150 years or 250 years tend to mean much more to us than the philosophers I mean as Europe reaches the end of its age it started in 1492 it was over 1945 begins with the explosion of Jews it ends with the inability to come to terms with Jewish Humanity with those concentration camps but of course the colonization of the world the reshaping of the whole world and the interests and in the image of those Nations between the Euro mountains in the Atlantic Ocean the europeanization of the world those last 40 years who really provides the deepest insights well Kafka is the Dante of late European modernity does any philosopher even come close to France Kafka I love John Dewey but let's not do it and it embarrassed John Dewey against Kafka you know oh no no no no no no no no no the Dante of our day Tony Morrison um Tony Morrison let's look at the underside let's look at the infernos let's look at the possibility for the purgatories or the paradises he even writes a novel The Paradise but the Beloved in fear now who has the courage the genius to explore the underside of the American experiment and do it in such a way that you steal Revel in humanity across the board but of course Tony Morrison writes as a musician she is a literary musician and her her her inspiration is the greatest musical artist of the 20th century I'm just gonna be real bodacious Sarah Vaughan Sarah you see when the when the history is written of who what artistic Mastery of craft and scale and scope and breath and intensity is willing to wrestle with the whole picture in light of a tradition bequeath to her in voice saravana Billy and Ella and others are unbelievable we won't get into a debate about that but Tony connects with saravan in that way you see and she gives us and has given us and will continue to give us uh we hope you know some resources to deal with this crisis in catastrophe that we are in because there's always a chance that we we might not get out that's why pessimism is so pervasive that's why your first chapter and Beyond pessimism is so timely the pessimism is among the younger generation is running a foot afro-pessimism is one of the most popular uh uh philosophical and theoretical perspectives and the lived pessimism to live nihilism of young people is off the charts it's on steroids now I don't think we have full data on that yeah you're right about it you really don't we don't yeah I've taught in prison for 42 years and I've seen it I've seen the transformation of many with the brothers I can't get into the sisters because it's a segregated system you see I can see it and so you know there's no guarantee but that's all right it's never been a guarantee we just got to fight that's what character is about defining who you are and deciding to be a certain kind of human being regardless of the circumstances because that's who you want to be Integrity is not about utilitarian calculation it's about the kind of person you want to be in what people will be able to see and say when you are in your grave what kind of Legacy you leave what kind of witness you enacted and most importantly whether you put a smile on the face of those who exemplify the highest levels of moral and spiritual Excellence what I call a revolutionary piety that reverent attachment to those who came before it could be vertical if you believe in God it could be horizontal for every human being those who have loved them and shaped their music and there's no accident at the market these days is erasing so much of young people's assets to the best of the past that's the sign of a decade of civilization you no longer have access to falling back on the best that allows you to deal with the crisis and so you come disarmed to the catastrophe and then wonder why you defeated so quickly hmm but you know this is the blues the blues always wrestled with catastrophe and then always a smile in a style couldn't style and smile can never be taken for you you got a joy that the world didn't give you and the world can't take away so y'all always come out swinging It Don't Mean a Thing If we ain't got that sweat that's my tradition that's my tradition yeah well I didn't have time for two more questions the last point you just made about how do we be armed from our Traditions to to address our catastrophe so how do we think about tradition especially even now we're thinking about the ways in which our text sit with our Traditions are often flawed you mentioned several philosophers tonight who has views that are really problematic and horrendous how do we grapple with the need to reclaim a tradition but also to be critical about it how do you how do you engage classic text that might have views within them that are actually quite quite horrendous and yet still want to claim resources from them that might be useful for us so how do you think about that question yeah I think one though I think that uh hermeneutical humility is a precondition or a prerequisite for any kind of serious intellectual engagement if you're looking for Pure to your pristine perspectives uh then you can go to a little narrow catechism that's connecting you to mannequin views that it has little to do with truth and beauty and reality and has everything to do with power and manipulation subjugation now unfortunately those are very popular they really are but I think anytime you're talking about Quest For Truth you acknowledge none of us have a monopoly on it same is true with beauty and goodness and the holy we don't have a monopoly on it as a Christian I learned from Malcolm as a Christian I learned from my dear sister Bell hooks who's Buddhist I learned from men bet because Buddhists I learned some Gandhi who's Hindu we love them just style we learn from John Dewey who agnostics and atheists and so forth I mean I I may have been a bit misleading when I've been talking about tradition because I should be talking about Traditions with an s no one of us have one tradition we may have been disproportionately shaped by a certain tradition that itself has diverse and heterogeneous expressions but all of us have different traditions and it cuts in a lot of different ways when black people began to redefine themselves as new world Africans through Hebrew texts in coin agree new textament texts that was a variety of different Traditions coming together when black people shift it from dreaming in African languages before they were on those barbaric ships and more and more began to dream in the language of Shakespeare and Milton and Rustin and Virginia Woolf English and most black folk I know and I love all of them no matter what language they dreaming in but most of them I know I talk daydreaming in English so no matter how African they think they are they better come to terms with linguistic hybridity linguistic appropriation now Black Folk have done things to English that's beautiful we won't go into it right now we don't go it may not pass a grammar test sometimes hey who cares about certain rules folk been making some rules for a long long time that's arbitrary and even when they have Fair rules like when Jack Johnson knocks out Max in Reno Nevada for the first time to get the black heavyweight champion what happened the next day they started killing black people all across the country don't you feel uppity just because he won only space in the whole country he got Fair rules and white man gets knocked out and black folk Dead next day so you say ah you want us to respect your rules you have no respect for your own rules but we refuse at our best to be in the gutter with the gangsters we're gonna Ascend to a moral and a spiritual that was talking about that with my Alpha Brothers today we had a marvelous conversation about that you see that we know no matter how gangsterized things are we refuse to allow being a gangster the conclusion we wrestled with the gangster in us but we still attempt to transcend it in that way and one of the ways you transcend it listening to a variety of different voices all the different Traditions all around the world you see that's why Coltrane was listening to Asia Africa Japan North Carolina High Point Hamlet his grandfather Reverend Blair who went to jail because of his love for black people cold train plan Love Supreme all of that's coming through he's got Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah he's reading all of that coming through Coltrane he's not isolated he's open to mobilizing all the insights he can in order to come to terms with a catastrophe that is multi-leveled and so when people talk about whether we read Plato what have you read Plato trying for yourself let's read Plato and have a conversation you think you know something about courage read the lockers you think you know something about Justice read Republic you know if you think something about party you'd read the use it from see what you think people say oh God this is more fascinating than I thought you don't say you're not the first one to reach that conclusion he got something to say well I don't I don't agree with him most people who read him don't agree that's not the point the playfulness of intelligence is the wrestling with the complexity of the issue it's the laying bear the possibilities and modalities of perspectives that Force us all of us to broaden our perspectives no matter where we come down individually and I'm just using Plato as one example because it's an easy example now people might say that you know about Thomas Jefferson should we read Thomas Jefferson he was a barbaric slave holder and a heroic Anti-Imperialist Guerrilla fighter or supporting the gorillas pushing out the most powerful Empire of the day I'm Anti-Imperialist so I'm with Jefferson fighting against the British Empire full solidarity full solidarity black man Sally Hennings could have been my my my my far cousin which means if I run into him in person I'm a Christian but not a pacifist you don't mess with my sister like that brother no no no no no no no statutory rape well we were really in love well you need a strong argument in that I'm being facetious but you all get the point it's the best and the worst it's the great breakthroughs and the thug your sides and that's true of all of us every culture every gender every sexual orientation nobody pure pristine no one free a spot a wrinkle I know we got just one last question did you want to answer any of these questions I think you're doing just fine I think you're doing just fine I don't want you to suppress your voice I feel empowered every voice and he's got so much to say believe me because his brother Michael got a whole lot to say well I do want to uh theme of this last question as one of of um advice we have faculty and staff here in the room from around the around the world who think about how to educate character and students here who want to develop it what advice do you have to faculty and staff about how to educate character and what advice to students do you have about how to develop it here in the University [Music] um well I mean in some ways though both of you and I you know going back to our conversations at Princeton brother uh we want to try to be the character that we write about um because we're at moments now where people have heard so many sermons but they haven't seen enough sermons let me see everybody can talk a good game pose and posture say something that sounds so X Y or Z because it's attractive but the real test is when you have to give up something and you have to take a risk got to go against the grain that's the test that's the crucial thing you see we wrestled with this with the Obama situation in terms of uh what does it mean to love truth love black people and support a black president brother West how come you so critical of Obama [Music] hating on the brother I don't like presidents who have intimate relations with Wall Streets that lets Wall Street Gangsters get away with not one going to jail when Jamal and the teacher getting railroaded to jail every day I don't care what color the president is I was talking to my dear brother Drumright I don't know if he's here today but with that yeah absolutely I was talking about another prophetic brother here the brother West that means what black people not gonna like you I don't love black people for them to love me back I love black people because they are precious and worthy of being loved period then I raised my voice I could be wrong I could be right but I'm not going to stop loving Black Folk not Obama's gone I'm Still Loving Him and black folk that ain't that wasn't a point the point was the hoods are still there the prisoners are still there the wealth inequality is still there drones are still being dropped on people all around the world the Americans using its power with various kinds of ugly regimes around the world that's still happening whether you got Bush Biden gangster brother Trump and he's dead of gangster he's an honest gangster he's a candid gangster and sometimes it's better for the gangsters to be honest to be up front as opposed to saying little nice things and then stealing away and speaking the truth see Trump is incapable even of that kind of shift because the gangster is it just cuts off through the bro you oh he stands in the need of prayer in a deep way but uh but the important thing is it's that's the test of character that's the test of care Thomas Paine says what these are the times that try human persons Souls character integrity honesty dignity and you discover when you make that kind of distinction it's never just race gender Nation class is human at its deepest level and when this human at its deepest level if there's not enough people standing with you you can become misanthropic and you can give up on the capacity of human beings to ever cultivate the capacity to have high quality character that's Jonathan Swift that is worse Mark Twain at the end of his life you see human beings really ain't worth nothing for the most part because all of them are basically tied to gangster and thugger's activity and there's some truth today there's always a truth in pessimism and nihilism and skepticism but for those of us fooled out with hope character integrity is not the truth that's the cross you have to go through and the long Saturday you have to live in order to still be tied to some possible Easter some possible Sunday some possible breakthrough some possible epiphany of Revelation or Kairos whatever secular religious language you want to use to allow human beings to have the chance of finding a way out and stay in movement given the dimness and grimness of our day and the saddest thing is I want to end with this though because this is something to help us understand some of our neo-fascist brothers and sisters in America I encountered this in Charlottesville and we were face to face and I could see the joylessness I could see the hatred and the anger even as they would listen to Stevie Wonder in the park see that's deeply American isn't it when they come to kill black folk but they want to listen to Stevie because his music Cuts so deep even their Humanity that's that's deeply America it's deeply human but especially America even with David Duke I run into David Duke you know he's head of one of the major Clan things and he's Catholic and the clan was founded against black folk Jews and Catholics now you got a Catholic running one of the main that's upward Mobility American Style that's American too next thing you know you're gonna have black folk and Jewish Folk foreign that's how wretched we are as human creatures I'm not just talking about them I'm talking about us there's elements of that in US elements of that in US in fact when I when one of the brothers came up to me you know one of the clan catch with all this stuff on and I'm sitting up that This Little Light of Mine I'm gonna let it shine I said oh Lord have mercy and he said I can't stand the fact that you always talking about brother brother on television I said oh brother oh I said Jesus loves you just like Jesus loves me I say you choose to be a cowardly gangster when I was a gangster before I met Jesus and now I'm a redeemed sinner with Gangster approach Liberties I'm on a human continuing with you but your choices are so spiritually sick it's going to lead toward the fascism that we lose all of the best of this imperfect flawed experiment but but you are my foe you are my enemy and we are in serious combat and to love your enemy for a brother like me means to always recognize that I'm hating the sin and steel staying in contact with the humanity of the sinner I'm hating the white supremacy but still recognizing white supremacy is just one form of evil that shot through all of our human hearts and souls and therefore Drawing the Line politically and ideologically but recognizing this same human being can end up changing transform because it's very difficult to grow up in the white supremacy civilization and not be so deeply shaped by white supremacy that no white person is born woke just like no black person is born woke you got to work at it you got to fight for it you got to undergo chains and transformation and education in order to reach it and in that sense the only hope that we have is generating characters who are enacting and embodying the Beautiful Things that they're talking about in writing about because if all you have are your text that are so beautiful but if your actions and your Praxis and your character is steal so thoroughly underdeveloped with very little effort for the attempt to be better then we all go down together hang together or hang separately and that's the uh I end on a blue note but as I said before the blues always ends with a smile [Laughter] [Applause] thank you thank you thank you thank you Bitcoin LS God bless y'all God bless you God bless you

Channel: The Program for Leadership and Character

Views: 37,819

Keywords: Leadership, Character, Character Education, Wake Forest University

Id: oXTwKV5aMj8

Length: 66min 52sec (4012 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 07 2022