Cornel West Explains Critical Race Theory

so let me bring up a big fight that was on display recently in american politics and that's the fight about critical race theory i'm not sure that there are many people even this audience who can define it to be quite honest and i was shocked the other day to see half of republicans in a monmouth poll said they opposed teaching the history of racism in u.s schools i don't know how you teach about the 13th amendment the 14th amendment i don't know how you teach about president lincoln or the civil i don't know but anyway clearly this is a point of political rage at the moment professor wesley let me ask you to begin here how do you deal with something like this yeah when especially when people will say you know what that's it for me i'm out of here or i'll attack my school board member what does critical race theory mean to you what do you associate it with i mean i wrote the four word to the text right critical race theory 1992 kimberly crenshaw kendall thomas they asked me to write the forward and the forward is we all have lens to which we view the world no theory is kind to us that cheats us of seeing we have to be able to see all the different dimensions all the different aspects and facets of america which is the best and the worst the mountaintops and the valleys you know the ugliness and the beauty that's true for every social experiment not just the united states that's true for ourselves inside of our soul the best and the worst so when the republican brothers come to me and say i don't have anything to do with racism i said oh let's get to your wound let's get to ways in which you feel as if that very phrase pulls the rug from under you and i'd have to listen to see what they have to say then i would say now let's see what kind of loving correction i can enact to get you to see the critical race theory is simply one set of lens that looks at the world looks at america through the lens of those who were enslaved jim crow jane crowe lynched discriminated against degraded debased and then look at what they produced musically artistically politically spiritually you see and what they produced is part of the very leaven in the american democratic loaf that's the crucial thing the blackfoot had produced a massive movement of the ku klux klan when they were being terrorized there'd be no american democracy america would've gone fascist a long time ago but here come mark king here comes fannie lou hamer here comes ella baker what is it about these folk that their dominant leadership looks at the world through the lens of their own suffering and connects their suffering with the suffering of others multiracial solidarity human connection and so forth that's a moral and spiritual issue it's not just political but once you lose that moral and spiritual dimension then it's just all machiavellian all the way down there's power power power and nobody wins that eye for eye blind tooth for tooth toothless that brother martin used to talk about you see so we'd have to create a context where people can get a sense that critical race theory is not this kind of fetishized entity that is an attack on me to attack on my whiteness and so forth i'm going to be white i was born white i'm dying white john brown was white miles horton was white whose mother whose wife whose wife co-wrote we shall overcome which is the anthem of the black freedom movement and we haven't got to rabbi abraham joshua hasho who could write a telegram to the president and say we need to forfeit our right to worship unless we treat these negroes with dignity and sanctity and he wrote that the day he was going to show up in the white house i said you don't get that kind of prophetic witness these days [Music] so that whiteness can't be reduced to white supremacy you got a whole lot of white brothers and sisters fighting against white supremacy they just got a lot of cousins who never got the memo that's that's a different thing that's a different thing

Channel: The Divine Names

Views: 56,176

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Id: AftoggVdQwY

Length: 4min 56sec (296 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022